Hebrews 12:11: The Harvest and the Ache

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Hebrews 12:11 (NIV)

The Harvest and the Ache

The top rows are the ones he does first, because there’s no shade up there at all once the hill turns. The vines were planted before he was born. Spring rain packed the ground and the weeds came up thick through the crust, and he works with his back more than his arms, three steps and a swing, three steps and a swing. He’s eighty-one. His son has the lower half and gets through it faster, and the two of them don’t work the same rows. He starts at the post with the bent wire and goes straight across, and he doesn’t stop at the ends.

By the middle of the morning his back has taken over everything he’s doing. The vines feel none of it. The weeds come out, and in September the fruit will come in heavier for the work going into it now. He’ll go down the steps at noon sideways, the way he goes down them now.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. What children are not disciplined by their father? The hardship in this passage comes to people God is already treating as his children, and he means it for their good, so they can share in his holiness. The harvest goes to the ones who were trained by it, and the training is where the pain was.

The order runs that way: accepted, then corrected. The writer of Hebrews concedes the pain instead of talking it down. The harvest comes later, and it comes up in the same person who took the hurt. None of that turns every hard year into a lesson with a name on it, and God hands no one a list of which years he meant.

From the track below, a woman on her way to the next place calls up and asks how his back is. He tells her the bottom four rows are coming out this winter and he isn’t replanting them.