Earned - Part 2 of 3 on 2 Timothy 2:6

"It is the hardworking farmer who ought to be the first to get a share of the crops." — 2 Timothy 2:6 (CSB)

Paul wrote this letter to Timothy from a Roman prison, near the end of his life, expecting execution rather than release. In this verse, the reward goes to the hard-working farmer first, before anyone else touches the crop, and Paul was not talking about that kind of work from a distance while he wrote it. Long before that particular cell, he had built tents for a living, traveled on foot and by ship across the Roman world, and kept working through beatings and shipwreck that would have ended most people's plans for good. He is describing his own life as much as anyone's. My own story is nowhere near that dramatic, though I have lived the same basic pattern enough times now to know Paul was onto something true.

Paul is also the same man who once said he had worked harder than everyone else, and then caught himself in the same sentence to add that it was not really him, it was the grace of God working in him the whole time. I believe both halves of that about my own life too. I did the hard work in every story below, but without God's grace, I would not have the accomplishment that came from it.

What I actually owe to hard work

Nearly everything good in my life traces back to the same cause, hard work repeated for long enough that the reward finally showed up. I started at Black Box VR in QA, and became the only backend developer here, leading a team, through nothing more exotic than sitting down and doing the unglamorous work of learning it, day after day, long before I was any good at it. My marriage is genuinely happy, and if you asked Maddy, she would probably tell you a lot of that is service happening behind the scenes, and she would not be wrong about that. Our cars stay running and our house stays in good shape for the same reason, because somebody keeps doing the maintenance instead of waiting for a crisis to force it.

The clearest one, my own body

My own body is the clearest example of this. For years I carried extra weight, peaking around 230 pounds, without any real routine to speak of. The weight came off through training five to six times a week at Black Box VR for a long stretch of time, most of which felt completely unremarkable while I was living through it. I have lost more than sixty pounds this way, and the version of me on the other side of that did not show up until long after the work had already started.

The waiting is the actual work

The hardest part of all of this was the gap between doing the work and seeing anything for it. A farmer plants and waters and waits through a season that produces nothing visible yet, and every example above ran through that same gap, learning code that did not pay off for months, training that did not show results for a long time, a marriage that had its own ups and downs before settling into something steady. Paul's farmer gets the harvest specifically because he stayed in the field through that gap instead of giving up in the middle of it.

Most people who quit do not quit at the start, when the work still feels new and motivating on its own. They quit somewhere in that gap, once the work has gone repetitive and there is still nothing to point to, and it stops feeling like it is leading anywhere. That is exactly where Paul was writing from, a cell with no evidence left that any of his own labor would bear fruit in his lifetime, still describing the work in terms of a farmer who has not yet seen a single stalk of grain. It is what work looks like before it is finished, every single time.

So do the work now that will not pay off until later. Sit down and learn the skill you do not have yet. Show up to the gym again today even though today will not be the day it shows. Do the small, unglamorous thing for your marriage that will not get noticed for years. None of it will feel earned yet, and it is not supposed to, because the harvest was never going to come during planting season. It will pay off in the end, it always does if you stick with it long enough. You only lose by stepping out of the arena.