I swear sometimes I am tired from the day before it has begun. I’ll sit here for a few moments in the morning, sighing as I brace myself for what I know is about to come: another endless carousel of dishes and laundry, sibling fights resolution, a hundred wipes of butts and runny noses, painstaking explanation of object of the preposition and carrying the one.

This is all good I am doing. It is good work. Yet sometimes goodness wears on you. “Good” is not a word that evokes much excitement. In our writing curriculum, it’s a banned word because it’s boring. We are more apt to honor the great life, not the good one. Perhaps, that is why Paul commanded, “Do not grow weary in doing good.” He knew continual, simple, mundane good-doing could make you weary. And yet, he also promises that it is this goodness that will be the most fruitful. “In due season we will reap, if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

It has been about ten years exactly since I found out I was pregnant with Gideon and now, sitting here pregnant with our sixth, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the past decade. It has been a decade of giving up my body, my sleep, endless wiping, endless lunch-making, endless laundry and menial work. It has been a decade of daily good-doing. And it has often made me weary. But I also look up now and I’m sort of amazed at what God has brought from it all. I see the glimpses of harvest, of fruit budding on the trees, fed by a decade of simple, uninteresting daily good.

We can look back and look forward so we will not grow weary in doing good. The harvest is coming. The harvest is here. Do not give up.