I stared across the table at her for just a moment or two this morning. She scarcely has more hair today than she did a year ago when she was born. She’s one year old and I’m thinking about where it all began, and how it all began on the outside.

A little smirk crosses my face as I think of a comparison between giving birth and the experience of being in war. There’s blood and momentary confusion and yelling (that would be me) and you know that all of life is not contained in this moment — you just have to get through this moment to get to the good on the other side. I ponder all that, and that word — labor — and how it’s the same word we use for work.

Hard labor.

Manual labor.

Six days shall ye labor… and rest on the seventh.

She smiles and bounces the feet that dangle underneath the tray of her high chair. And an old thought strikes me in a new way:

It seems like the hardest things in life sometimes are also the best things.

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Whether it’s the numerous challenges of pregnancy and labor (or the challenges of the parenting years that follow), whether it’s the challenge of pursuing that PhD or writing that book or building something amazing, composing something amazing, there’s labor, and it is a part of the story that good things come from.

The labor of sowing the seeds and watering and weeding and waiting, and finally, reaping what you’ve sown.

The labor of teaching small and precious ones day in and day out, sowing those seeds and trusting the world will reap them years from now.

In a great conversation about these thoughts today a friend of mine put it succinctly: Just about everything in life requires hard work except watching TV.

Barring those moments of laying on the couch and being entertained by a screen in the room or a phone at your nose, life does require work. And the things that are really worth it? They usually require the most.

I’m making fresh commitments to myself about working hard right now.

About resting well and appropriately, yes, but also about knowing my own frame and, based on that, committing to work hard to achieve personal goals.

It convicted me deeply when I read these words recently in Tim Tebow’s new book:

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

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The Bible puts it this way:

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. {Gal. 6:7}

Pray about everything. Seek wisdom. But know that in addition to that praying and that seeking, you will also have to do your part. You will have to put in the time at the gym. You will have to put the seeds in the ground. You will have to dust off that resume and start putting it in front of new sets of eyes. You might have to stop spending when you should be saving.

The hardest part might just be stepping out of the boat — doing something that doesn’t look like the “normal” everybody else has going on. Putting in extra efforts at the end of that 9 to 5 instead of putting your nose to a screen.

Jesus lived a life like nobody else because He was a Man like nobody else. In our own small ways, perhaps we are called to go and do likewise.

I write these words to myself — pondering the things that might perhaps have been birthed with the time I spent on the couch instead.

But I write to you, too, knowing there is probably more inside of you. A dream. A hope. An idea of some kind that could scratch an itch you feel in your soul and feed a need in the world around you.

If I dream of seeing my name on the front cover of a bestseller, I’m going to have to put in the hard work to make that happen.

If we dream of having world-changing kids, we’re going to have to put in the hard work to raise them to change the world.

If you dream of making ______________ happen… what are the practical steps you need to take to do something about it?

Looking across the table at this baby who’s just one, I come to rejoice in the fact that in different ways, and in His good timing, God is faithful to our labor. Fruit doesn’t always come the way we want, as fast as we want, as much as we want. But we will not reap what we have not sown.

Lean hard on the Holy Spirit to direct your efforts, to prune you and give you wisdom, that you might bear much fruit.

And don’t be afraid if the path you see ahead of you looks like nobody else’s. It’s not supposed to.

xCC

 

 

 

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