Two Summers of Digging

Her grandfather and two of his brothers dug it by hand and it took them the summer of one year and most of the next.

Thirty-one feet. She knows the number because it is scratched on the underside of the lid along with a date, and the writing is her great-uncle's and it is not good writing.

They did it in the evenings and on Sundays after, and there was a stretch in the second summer where they hit something and went about four feet in eleven weeks.

They could have paid to have it drilled. Not easily, and not without borrowing, but it was a possibility that was discussed and everybody knows it was discussed.

They dug it.

She is fifty-four and there is a thing she has noticed about herself in the last decade that she does not like.

She cannot stay with anything that outlasts a weekend.

Not can not, exactly. She has the time. It is that at some point in a long job, usually early, something in her goes to the end of it, sees how far away that is, and quietly withdraws. She has three of those going at the moment and she is not doing any of them.

And in July she was out at the well with her nephew, showing him the writing on the underside of the lid, and he asked how long it took.

And she heard herself say two summers, in the tone you use for something impressive.

And she drove back to the house not liking herself much.

Endurance is produced, not possessed

Let me say the fair thing before the rest of it, because there has been a great deal of hardness in that kitchen since July and it has not helped once.

You are not lazy and you are not soft. You raised people. You have sat with two members of that family through things that took months and you did not go anywhere. Whatever is going on with the three unfinished jobs, it is not a lack of stamina, because you have demonstrated stamina in the places where it actually cost something.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as flattery: staying with a long thing is something that gets made in a person rather than something they either have or do not. That is not my kind reading of a decade, it is what stands written in Romans, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was at a well head with you and your nephew in July.

Read the order Paul puts it in, because the order is the whole thing.

We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.Romans 5:3-4

Produces. It is a manufacturing word.

Perseverance is not listed as a quality some people were issued with. It is described as an output, made by staying in something that is long and hard, and then it goes on to make something else, and that makes something else again.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a different temperament: the staying power is manufactured in the staying, because the written word puts perseverance on the output side of the line and the Spirit of God is the one running the process.

Now let me tell you what your grandfather and his brothers were actually making, since you have been telling your nephew it was a well.

Eleven weeks for four feet in the second summer. Think about what that does to three men.

Every evening of those eleven weeks, one of them went down and came up with almost nothing, and they kept going, and there is not one thing in the world that could have persuaded them to keep going except that they had already decided to.

The well is thirty-one feet deep. What they made in those two summers was three men who could not be stopped by eleven weeks, and every one of that family got the benefit of those three men for another forty years, and not one drop of that came out of the bucket.

And here is the piece for you. You are not short of what they had. You have simply not been in anything long enough to make it since you were young.

What is written says perseverance is produced, and the Holy Spirit does not hand it out ready-made to people who have arranged their lives so that nothing takes very long.

And the guard, which matters: nothing here says a fast job is a lesser job, and nothing here is telling you that the three unfinished things are a moral matter. Some of them may simply be things you do not want, and dropping those is not a failure. What is being handed back is the ability to choose one and stay with it.