Church Planter's Wife

“If you work hard, it will eventually work out.” This is a paraphrase of a post that I read recently on social media. And sometimes this is true. If you practice something well, and you practice enough times you will probably get better at it. If you plant a garden, you carefully till the soil, plant the seed, water the ground, give it adequate sunshine, weed it, and you do this hard work consistently until the end of the season you will get fruit. You will have a reward at the end. You will have something beautiful or edible to show for all of your hard work. It will work out.

I am not so great at gardening, and I wish I had my grandmother’s green thumb, but what I am missing most is the dedication and perseverance to make a garden go, to see it out to the end. And I know that if I was consistently putting in effort, doing the right “gardening things” I would be much more successful than I am now. I look at other people’s beautiful  raised beds, and the produce that they cultivate from the ground and I long to be that person for a fleeting moment, and then I realize that in order to get that fruit it isn’t just about beautiful beds and fruit, it is about hard work and dedication. Hard work and dedication that I seem to lack the perseverance for at this time in life. But these gardeners put the work in, and they are successful. 

But what happens when something goes wrong? Something that isn’t in your control? What happens when you put in the hard work, you do the right “things” and you still don’t get the results that you desire, the results that you were “promised” for your hard work? Maybe it was unseasonably hot or cold and your plants produced less fruit because of this. Maybe the fruit is more bitter because of the change in weather–it just doesn’t taste the same even though you put in the same or more effort into cultivating the fruit. Maybe there was too much rain this year, or not enough rain and you experienced a drought. What if fungus takes over your garden?

I am sure some of you expert gardeners out there would have a solution for many of these problems. But the point is life throws us curveballs. Sometimes putting in hard work doesn’t always get us the results we want or expect. It happens all of the time. Maybe you’ve gone into this church planting thing with a time-table, hard work, and determination, and what resulted didn’t fit the picture you had painted before jumping into all of this. Maybe it is because God has another plan for you, because God wants you to depend on God and not your own hard work. Does this mean you have to quit working hard? No! But should you lean on God, spend time with God, and depend on God to see you through whatever the situation may be while being diligent to be a faithful steward of the call God has given you? Absolutely. You see, hard work doesn’t always pay off–at least in the way we might expect; it doesn’t always work out to work hard. But it does always work out to lean on God, to be faithful to the call God has given you. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose,” (Romans 8:28 NIV). 

And of course this isn’t limited to just church planting. You can substitute for “church planting” almost any other endeavor in life. And rightly so. There are days when I need to press in to the Lord as a wife and mother. Working harder to clean my house doesn’t always work out, in fact, I would say most days this is the case. The adults being outnumbered four to two means that there can be a lot of crazy and a lot of mess in the Beverly house. I need to depend on the Lord for patience—patience to accept the mess, patience to teach my children to pick-up their messes, and patience to allow them to learn these skills and develop them well so that they can grow into adulthood. Trust me, this is not my strong suit. Even with hard work the house doesn’t always stay clean. Even with hard work, my patience can still wear thin. But if I depend on God, then God will get me through and make me better in the end. The house still may be a mess, it may not look the way I want, and my kids may not clean exactly the way that I would like, it may not look much like the picture of what I thought would happen if I would just put in the “hard work.” But as a family we are all growing and developing which does work. God is doing a work in us. And this is much bigger and better than any picture I could have imagined on my own.