What Remains

"...I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow." - 1 Corinthians 3:6 (NIV)

The night nurse gathers her things while the morning nurse sets hers down. They trade a few quiet words about which patients needed checking on through the night, and then one heads out to her car in the early morning light while the other begins her rounds. The patients sleep through the shift change. The work of caring for them doesn't stop or even slow. That work passes from one set of hands to the next, the way it has every morning before this one. No single nurse was ever carrying it alone. It was underway before she came, and it goes on after she leaves.

Much of what God does in us is carried on quietly, through the very hours we sleep. We have a real part in it, but the life itself was never ours to begin, and it is not ours to keep alive. "...I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow" (1 Corinthians 3:6). It is a wonder, when you stop to think of it. You can do all a farmer does, break the ground and carry water until your back aches, and still not say one word that would make a seed stir in the dark and turn toward the light. That has always been God's alone to do. "So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow" (1 Corinthians 3:7).

The thing is, we measure God by what we can see Him doing, and most of what He does never rises to our sight. So we begin to believe that when our eyes are turned away, nothing is happening there. But isn't there someone you once prayed for and stopped expecting to change, or some worn place in your own heart you asked God to mend and quietly gave up on? "He will not let your foot slip — he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:3-4). Our looking may have stopped, but His never did. All through the night, He kept working the very ground you surrendered as hopeless.

That is a hard thing to live with, harder than it sounds. Somewhere we believe things hold together only because we are holding them, and that belief has to loosen. A field bears a harvest, but it never struggled and strained to grow one. It cannot raise one stalk of wheat by trying harder. It only receives the seed, drinks the rain, and yields to the long unhurried seasons, until one morning the grain stands gold where the dirt once lay bare. When it comes to the life God grows, we are not the farmer. We are the field. Whatever good is stirring in you, you didn't create it, and you cannot sustain it in your own strength. It was God's work from the first buried seed, and it is His to bring to harvest.

So you are free to stop counting the little of His work you have been able to see clearly so far, and begin weighing how much more lies beyond your sight. He has not stopped working in the people or places you had to leave before your work was finished, and what He is doing there runs deeper than you could picture. "...no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him" (Isaiah 64:4). To wait for God is not to sit with idle hands. It is to remain at your work with your eyes lifted up, watching for Him to raise something living from the very ground you had counted as barren. He was growing it before you woke this morning, and He is growing it still. Stay in Him. Move with Him.

Prayer

Father, thank You for the work You carry on while we sleep, and for the growth we never had to make ourselves. Teach us to remain faithful to what You have already begun, and to watch with open eyes for all You have not yet shown us. Amen.