The Job That Has to Be Done Again Tomorrow

I worked something out this year and I am going to put it down because nobody told me and I would have liked to be told.

There are two kinds of job.

There is the kind that finishes. Mending a gate finishes. Painting the door finishes, and when it is done it is done and it stays done and you can walk past it in three weeks and it is still done, and there is a particular good feeling that goes with that kind and everybody knows what I mean.

And then there is the other kind, which does not finish, it pauses.

The water is that kind. The mucking out is that kind. Bringing the hens in is that kind. Every single one of those is a job I will do again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and doing it well today makes no difference whatsoever to whether I have to do it tomorrow.

That is the part that got me. Doing it well does not buy you anything. If I muck out that stall to a standard nobody has ever achieved on this farm, the stall is exactly as dirty in the morning as if I had done a reasonable job, and I checked, over about a week, deliberately.

I told Dad about my experiment and he laughed for quite a long time, which I was not expecting.

Then he said that he had done that experiment too, at about my age, and that everybody does it, and that the results are always the same and everybody has to get them for themselves.

I asked him how you keep doing a job that only pauses. He said you do not think about tomorrow while you are doing today, and I said that sounded like a thing people say, and he said yes it does, and that it is also the only method there is.

Bucky, who is the direct cause of a considerable proportion of the pausing kind of job on this farm, stood in the exact square yard I had just cleared and looked at me while I was still holding the fork.

The condition nobody quotes

Paul writes a sentence that gets put on things, and the last four words are always left off.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)

If we faint not. The promise about the season has a condition and the condition is only about continuing. Not about doing it better, not about doing it with a good attitude, not about doing it and enjoying it.

And weary in well doing is worth stopping on. Not weary of it. In it. A person can be extremely tired in the middle of doing a right thing and the verse does not treat that as a problem, it treats it as the expected weather.

You are allowed to be tired inside the thing rather than needing to be tired of it before it counts, and Galatians 6:9 says weary in rather than weary of. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction the difference between quitting and continuing.

The word for faint there is about giving out entirely, about a thing collapsing rather than slowing. Which means the condition is a low bar on purpose.

You have not been given a standard about pace. The written word attaches the reaping to not collapsing rather than to doing well, and His Spirit is what makes a low bar a mercy rather than an insult.

Sowing is the other half of the picture

The verse before it explains why a job that only pauses is still a job.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. (Galatians 6:7)

Sowing is exactly the pausing kind of work. A man scatters seed and there is nothing to look at, and he does it again the next field and the next week, and no individual handful of seed does anything visible on the day it leaves his hand.

And nobody looks at a sower in April and says the field is finished. The doing of it and the seeing of it are separated by a season on purpose, and the whole system runs on that gap.

You are working in a gap that is built into the arrangement rather than a delay in it. Galatians 6:7 puts sowing and reaping at opposite ends of a season, and the Spirit of God is what makes that gap read as design instead of as disappointment.

And the instruction right after the promise is the practical one: as we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men.

You have been pointed at the opportunity in front of you rather than at the whole field. Galatians 6:10 says as we have opportunity, which is one thing at a time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a boy with a fork.