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Six years after she planted a vineyard no accountant would have approved, a South African winemaker has her first reviews. She never planted it for the wine.
Let us not be weary in doing good, for we will reap in due season, if we don't give up.
Galatians 6:9
When the world shut down in 2020, Natasha Jacka was twenty-seven and studying winemaking near Cape Town, until the pandemic shrank her life to the edges of her parents' garden. She stood at a window and imagined vines there. Then she planted them, more than a thousand by hand, each one staked upright in two small blocks of the yard. Six years on, the wine from that garden has earned its first serious reviews, and the critic who gave them called the whole project a triumph of hope over good sense.
He was not only being kind. A vineyard that small cannot turn a profit, and fine wine is punishing to make. By any reasonable accounting it was a foolish thing to try. Jacka knew that better than anyone. I wasn't looking at it like it's going to make a fortune, she said. This is a labor of love.
There is a line in one of Paul's letters about not growing weary in doing good, because the harvest comes in its own season if we do not give up. It is easy to hear it as a promise that effort pays off. The surrounding lines are steadier than that. The good is worth doing for its own sake, and what it yields runs on a clock that is not ours. Those four silent years of tending were not a price she paid for the wine. They were the love itself, taking its time.
Most of what is worth doing cannot be defended on a spreadsheet. A marriage, a craft, a child raised, a faith kept. You plant it because you love it, in a season you did not choose, and if a harvest comes it arrives more like grace than like wages. The reviews are good now. They were never the reason.