Stuck home in lockdown, a South African woman planted 1,400 vines by hand and tended them four years before the first harvest. Paul knew that long middle well.
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, a twenty-seven-year-old in South Africa named Natasha Jacka got stuck at her parents' house, her winemaking studies suspended, with nothing much to do. She stood at a window looking at the garden and imagined vines there. So she planted some. Fourteen hundred of them, squeezed into two blocks of her parents' yard, by hand. Then came the part the lockdown could not speed up. It took four years of tending, with no wine to show for it, before the first harvest. She did all of it herself, down to stomping the grapes. When her first bottles finally arrived, the critics were stunned. One called the whole thing a triumph of hope over good sense.
There is a line in one of Paul's letters for exactly the long middle of a thing like that. Let us not grow weary in doing good, he writes, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up. Notice the order. The reaping is real, but it comes at the end, in its own season, not ours. Everything before it is the unglamorous part: the planting, the watering, the years when the rows look like nothing and no one would blame you for quitting.
Almost every good thing is built this way. A marriage, a craft, a child raised, a faith kept. You plant it in a season you did not choose, often a hard one, and then comes the long stretch where you simply do not stop. The harvest, when it finally comes, looks sudden to everyone who did not watch the four quiet years. The work was hidden the whole time it was working.
She could have spent that lockdown waiting for it to end. Instead she put something in the ground. The vines did the rest, in their own time, the way most things worth having do.