Sowing Vs. Reaping

For the last several months I have been working on a major fundraiser for our community's group home for foster children. It is an exciting, first time event that has sold over 700 tickets so far. It has become a 20-30+ hour a week job in recent weeks. We are on track to raise tremendous awareness and a nice sum of money.

The morning of the event I will leave for our trip to the DR. I won't get to be there to see the months of work come to fruition. My call for this event has been to sow, even though I will not be there for the culmination of my efforts. I will miss the high fives of the exhausted organizers and the reward of hearing the final fundraising tally.

While in the DR we will be participating in manual labor type work projects around a Young Life camp there (for local Dominican teens). We will only be there a week, so our project will likely be something small in the grand scheme of things. Past projects have included building handicap access ramps or retaining walls. While the ultimate vision for the camp is huge--our week will be spent sweating out a small part of the ultimate result.

We may not ever make it back to see the end result or the completed camp...but the intended audience/recipients will. Dominican teenagers will come and enjoy the fruits of our labor as they experience joy, adventure and an encounter with the Gospel. A handicapped teenager may hear about the love of their Savior for the first time because that ramp was built. Another teenager may sit on a rock wall we construct to read their Bible for the first time. We have no way of knowing. We are just going with willing hearts and hands to do the task assigned to us.

The beautiful thing is that I am not bitter about being a mere contributor in either situation. By the grace of God, my heart is actually feeling very blessed with the roles God has given me.

As I was thinking about this today, I was reminded that much of life has us sow in places we will likely never reap. Conversely, we often reap the benefits of sowers who have come before us. If we consider it honestly, most of us reap more than we sow in many aspects of our daily lives. When we walk into a church, a school, a workplace--we generally find ourselves the recipients of a heritage left behind by others.

May we not resent the times that we are called to invest in places we know we will not receive benefit from. The truth of life is that most things/lives are better when they are so covered in the fingerprints of various contributors no one gets the credit.

At the end of the day, it really is all God's story anyway. May we be good stewards of the roles He grants us: sowers, reapers and anywhere in between.

As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.

Sow your seed in the morning, and at evening let your hands not be idle,
for you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that, or whether both will do equally well.
Ecclesiastes 11:5-6 NIV