The Cost of Giving Up

Giving up is easy. Just throw your hands up, walk away from what’s challenging you or frustrating you, and stop thinking about it. It doesn’t take effort or inner strength to give up. It just takes a choice.

I’ve been there before. Actually, I think I was there this morning. Faced with all this overwhelming stress, this crushing workload, and the exhausting struggle of planning for the future, I considered just walking away from all of it. I was ready this morning. Because what does giving up actually cost?

If I didn’t have to work so hard to make a living, maybe I could rest. If I didn’t have to take care of family members and friends so often, maybe I could actually take care of myself for a change. If I didn’t have to plan for the future outcome of two businesses, maybe I could make one of them work. Sounds to me like giving up would be a greater benefit to me than pressing onward has been.

But is that the truth?

The truth is no matter how little I work, I don’t rest. I don’t know how, and that’s a soul issue. The same is true in taking care of myself, and spending more time to myself won’t help my heart any. And maybe my focus is pulled in two directions with two businesses, but I’m not ultimately responsible for the success of either. And maybe it seems like giving up won’t cost me anything, but that’s an illusion. Because giving up on any of those fronts would cost me the blessings I haven’t received yet.

Work will be rewarded (2 Chronicles 15:7). That’s a promise God makes us. When we work for Him, He promises to reward us for what we’ve done. But the truth about rewards from God is that they don’t always follow the work immediately. Sometimes you have to wait for a while.

Think of it like a harvest. It’s wintertime now, and across Kansas all the wheat fields are dormant. They were all planted before the first freeze, and most fields are already sprouted. Some are green, although right now most are yellowish and brown because we’re having such a dry year. But the farmer who planted the field doesn’t know how the field is going to grow.

He planted the field before winter, and he’s trusting that the field will bring a great harvest in summer. But there’s six months between planting and harvesting.

The same is true with any great objective in our lives. First you plant the seed. Then, you wait for it to grow. Then, you keep waiting. Sometimes you have to tend it, water it, feed it. But mostly you have to leave it alone and just keep living your life. Eventually, the time will come when you can harvest, when the seed has grown into a strong, beautiful plant. But it never happens overnight.

Think about it.

When you try to get in shape, you have to exercise. You don’t develop strong muscles overnight. You have to keep at it. You have to keep walking, keep lifting weights, keep doing your best and working hard to be able to claim the benefits of exercise.

When you start a business, you can’t just let it sit. You have to work it. You have to build contacts, reach out to potential customers, create products, manage campaigns, and talk to people you don’t know. Your business won’t sell a million products overnight (unless you’re just super blessed … and if you are, can you give me a lesson?).

What would have happened if J.K. Rowling gave up after her tenth publisher’s rejection? What would have happened if Edison gave up on inventing the light bulb or if the Wright brothers decided that they should stick to making bicycles?

Giving up before they succeeded wouldn’t have cost them anything they currently had. It would have cost them what they were going to achieve. And it’s the same with the rest of us.

If you give up now, you’re forfeiting something great. No, you don’t have it now, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never get it. You’ll get that reward when the time is right (Galatians 6:9) and not a moment sooner.

Here on Earth, we get focused on time. We live and die by the clock. But when we come face to face with God’s schedule, we need to readjust our perspective. Time has no meaning to Him. He made time. He is beyond time, and so He’s not subject to it. God sees time very differently than we do (2 Peter 3:8-9). And just because He isn’t running according to our watches, doesn’t mean He’s late.

God is always on time. We’re the ones with the watches that run too fast or too slow.

Think about your deadlines that way. So many times I feel the urge to give up because I’m not going to achieve something by the time I set. But who cares about the time I set? My timetable isn’t the one that matters. So how can I even consider giving up when I don’t even have access to the timetable God’s running on?

Yes, giving up is easy. But it costs more than we’ll ever know. So just hold on. I know it’s hard. I know it’s frustrating. I know it’s taking everything you have to just crawl out of bed in the morning. (I know because I’m there too.) But the reward is bigger and better than we can imagine.

Keep walking. Keep writing. Keep believing. Keep building. Keep moving forward. Keep on keeping on. Don’t give up. The ones who came before us endured more than we have, and they’ve received their rewards in full, just like God promised (Hebrews 12:1-3).

Who’s to say we won’t be next?

Seeds will grow without your help

For the last few weeks, I’ve been walking 4 or 5 times a week after I get home from work. Not much. Only about 45 minutes. If I were able to stay home and work on the farm all the time, I wouldn’t need to exercise, but I work a desk job. A whole 8 hours or more can go by in a day at my office, and I’ll realize I’ve only gotten up to go to the bathroom twice. And that’s the only time I’ve been out of my desk chair.

So I decided that I needed to do something about that. And walking seemed to be the only option available to me with my schedule. When it was hot, I’d walk 45 minutes on the treadmill, while I streamed episodes of television shows off Amazon. But since the weather has been so nice in recent weeks (and because my parents are at home with me now in case something unforeseen happens out on the road), I’ve been walking outside. The view is so much nicer (and besides, I’m running out of free episodes of Bleach).

I walk from one section line to the other and back, which works out to be 2 miles. Not much. But not bad, considering I’m just starting out. And I can do it about 45 minutes. As I walk, I usually get to see the sun set or tractors out in the fields or sheep grazing. But last night I saw something that surprised me.

Safe Haven Farm, my home, sits at the south end of a 640 acre plot of wheat and alfalfa, none of which is ours sadly. But it’s surrounded by farmland–mostly wheat. But this time of year, it’s all just dirt. Dirt fields as far as the eye can see. I walk right past a couple of them every night now. Except last night, the dirt field west of Safe Haven Farm had developed green fuzz.

Yes, I’m being silly. It’s winter wheat. But what struck me last night was that the farmer sowed that crop of what in the dark a few days back, and all it took was a weekend and a few days for it to cover the entire field. He didn’t have to babysit it. He didn’t have to watch it. He didn’t have to water it. He just planted it and let it go.

And I think that’s an important lesson I need to learn.

Today’s verse is James 5:7-8.

The wheat field to the far west of Safe Haven Farm, Haven, KS

Dear brothers and sisters, be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near.

I’m not a micromanager, but I am a control freak. I like to know what’s happening and when and how I can help it be more efficient. But what I’ve learned in life is that the more I interfere, oftentimes the more I slow already-existing processes down.

This verse is directed at people who are getting impatient for Jesus to return for His people, and that’s definitely what it means. But it applies in other situations too. Just because you’re given the opportunity to plant a seed doesn’t mean you’ll get to see it sprout, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ll get to harvest it.

Most times what happens is you plant a seed in someone’s life–a good deed, the love of Christ, whatever–and you never see that person again. You may never know how your actions affected that person. You might have to wait till you get to heaven to learn what difference you made in someone else’s life.

And that’s okay. Or at least, it should be okay.

But there’s something in us that wants to do it all. Or maybe that’s just me. If I’m the one who starts something, I want to be the one to finish it. I want to start with that open, empty field and plant the seeds and watch it grow and harvest it for Christ. Me alone.

But that’s selfishness talking. That’s me focusing on what I want and not necessarily what God wants–or what God says is best for me or for the person in question.

The point is this: We all plant seeds. Every day of our lives, we’re planting seeds. I hope it’s all good seed, because good seed produces a good crop. But regardless whether it’s good seed or bad seed, we all plant. But that seed doesn’t need your help to grow.

If a seed is planted, it will grow without you. That’s how God set up the law of planting and harvesting. That’s a natural law. True, some plants need our help to survive, but not all of them. Most plants will go on living and growing whether we’re there to water them or not.

So don’t despair if you plant a seed in someone’s life and then you aren’t able to oversee it. Don’t worry if you’ve planted a seed and you haven’t seen any growth. Seeds will grow on their own, and someone will always be around to harvest a crop that’s ready. You don’t have to do everything.

So embrace the role of seed planter, knowing that what you’re doing is starting a process that God Himself will oversee. And if you’re fortunate enough to get to watch a crop grow–if you’re fortunate enough to be the one who gets to harvest–be thankful.