Industrious Waiting

Farming is hard work and lots of waiting. Even home gardeners recognize that. But, both know by experience that once the crop is in the ground that there is still much to do in the waiting time till harvest. Plants need water. They need de-bugged. The soil around them needs weeded. The better the care, the better the resulting harvest.

Oswald Chambers wrote, "The farmer does not wait with folded arms but with intense activity; he keeps at it industriously until the harvest."

 

As praying moms, we sow prayers into our children's lives. While we wait to see the harvest, we keep working. Our work is, of course, being persistent in prayer, but it is also persistent love. Both are not inactive but active. Both take time. Both take effort. And both may meet resistance.

 

Sometimes our children are resistant to our love. We open our arms to them and they turn their backs. There are times our children are difficult to love. They can be unkind, even cruel.

 

And we all know there may rise resistance within ourselves to persistent prayer. We want to see answers "now." And when we don't, we become discouraged and can convince ourselves that prayer isn't "working," that perhaps God doesn't hear or, worse, doesn't care.

 

We react with que sera sera—what will be will be. We turn away to put our time and effort elsewhere letting the crop tend for itself. We stop working for the harvest.

 

But industrious waiting doesn't have a defeatist attitude. Industrious waiting, instead, continues to nurture and watching over the crop carefully with more prayer and more love.  Waiting and working, waiting and working, until the golden harvest makes its appearance.

 

Industrious waiting in prayer believes that all the work will not be for nothing. Industrious waiting believes that in the time between the sowing and the harvest God is working.

 

May the words of the Apostle Paul encourage us all—

"Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord."

1 Corinthians 15:58 (NKJV)