Verse of the Day for January 23

Three weeks into a new pattern is where the arithmetic starts to feel wrong. You have put in more than you have got back, and the ledger is visible.

Let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

There are two conditions in that sentence and they are easy to blur. Due season is the first — the harvest has a date and the date is not ours to set.

Paul is writing to people who had begun well and were being pulled elsewhere, which is why the verse is set among instructions about sowing. Sowing is the least rewarding stage of farming. Nothing about the act itself tells you whether it worked.

If we faint not is the second. The word means to lose heart, to slacken, to give out. Paul is not warning about failure. He is warning about quietly easing off.

Which tells you what the danger actually is at this point in a habit. Not collapse. Attrition.

Sowing and reaping are separated by a season, and the gap is not evidence that the sowing failed. It is what a season is.

Do not decide the harvest is not coming while you are standing in the field in February.