The Long Crop He Stopped Sowing

Nobody would notice from the road. That is worth saying because the men who would notice are the ones he would least want to explain it to.

The place looks well. The fences are up, the yard is tidy, the machinery is maintained better than most, and every year there is a crop and the crop is decent.

What has gone is anything slow.

He has not put in the orchard block his father talked about. He has not replaced the shelter belt, which has four or five years left in it at most and needs planting now if it is going to be there when it is needed. He has not touched the drainage in the low field, which is a three year job that pays back for forty.

He does the one year things. He does them well.

He is fifty nine and he has an answer ready for anybody who asks, and the answer is about money and about not knowing what the market will do, and there is enough truth in it to get him through a conversation at a market or a funeral.

The actual reason arrived in his own head about four years ago and has never left it and has never been said out loud. He does not expect to be here for it.

Not because he thinks he is ill. He is fine. It is something else, and it came in over about a decade of listening to people he respects, and it is not a date and it is not a chart. It is a settled and unexamined assumption that the long things are not going to be needed.

Sit on the gate. There is a verse about due season that has a condition in it, and the condition is not the one you would expect.

In due season, if we do not give up

Here it is, and the whole weight of it sits on the last clause.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.Galatians 6:9

If we do not give up. That is the condition, and it is the only one. Not if the timing works out. Not if there is enough time left. Not if the season arrives before something else does.

The verse is written to people who are tired, and the tiredness it addresses is precisely the tiredness of long work that has not come back yet. That is the situation it exists for.

You are being told to keep going rather than to shorten your horizon. Galatians 6:9 attaches the reaping to a due season that belongs to God rather than to anybody's estimate, and the Spirit inspired it with only one condition on the front of it.

And notice what due season means. It means the proper time, decided by somebody else. The verse is not promising you will see it in the way you have in mind. It is promising that the reaping is real and the timing is His, which is exactly what a man who cannot see the far end of a shelter belt needs.

What actually stopped

Now the assumption, because it has been running unexamined for a decade and it deserves an examination.

It came in gradually, which is why it never got tested. Nobody sat you down and told you not to plant an orchard. What happened is that a general expectation settled in you over years, and general expectations do not present themselves as claims, so they never have to justify themselves.

And it is worth being precise about what it actually is. It is a prediction. It is not a chart or a date, and it is more socially respectable than either, and it is doing the same work.

The whole New Testament expectation runs without a schedule, and the one recorded case of people letting it change their working lives is reported as a problem that had to be corrected. Nobody in that book is ever commended for having shortened their horizon.

You are not more faithful for having done it. Nothing written anywhere makes a short horizon a virtue, and the Spirit is not the source of an assumption that arrived over ten years and has never once been asked to show its working.

You did not receive that from God. Nothing written anywhere told a farmer to stop putting in the slow things, and the Spirit does not produce a settled assumption that quietly cancels a shelter belt.

The shelter belt is not for you

Here is the part that will land hardest and it is the honest one.

You may not be here for it. That is true and it has always been true, and it was true of your father when he planted the trees that are sheltering your yard right now.

He did not plant those for himself. He planted them for a man he had not met, who turned out to be you.

That is what a shelter belt is. That is what drainage is. The whole of that kind of work is a transfer to somebody else, made by somebody who will not be around to collect, and the fact that you might not be here for it is not an argument against doing it, it is a description of what it is.

You are permitted to plant for somebody you will not meet. What is written promises a reaping in due season without telling anybody which season, and the Spirit is not asking a man of fifty nine to only do things he will personally collect on.

Put the shelter belt in this year.

And there is a second thing that goes with it, which is that a man who has been quietly not doing the long work has usually stopped talking about the long work as well. Nobody on that farm has heard you plan anything past this harvest in four years. Say the plan out loud to somebody, at the market or at your own table, because a thing said out loud gets harder to quietly drop, and because the people around you have almost certainly noticed and drawn conclusions of their own. Nothing written anywhere asked a man to carry a decision like that on his own, and the Spirit works in a yard where somebody says the plain thing first.