Devotional.
It's blackberry season, and Jesse is obsessed with them. He can eat his body weight in about four minutes.
Turn your head, and before you know it, he comes back from a bramble with a purple beard and stained hands and no memory of ever being asked to share.
But he keeps picking the red ones. He is convinced they are raspberries.
He'll hold one up, delighted with himself, and I have to crouch down and explain it again.
That one isn't ready yet. It isn't a raspberry. It's the same blackberry, a week or two behind.
Give it more sun, more rain, more time, and it will go dark and soft and sweet. Pick it now and all you get is sour.
He never really believes me. To him, if it's there and it's pretty, it should be ready.
I laugh at him, but I do the same thing with so many things.
When something in my life is still hard, still unresolved, still not what I hoped it would be by now, I look at it the way Jesse looks at a red berry.
I take the color as proof that something has gone wrong. I decide it's the wrong fruit. And I want to pick it early, force it, have an answer today, because waiting feels too much like nothing happening.
But unripe is not the same as failed. Unfinished is not the same as abandoned.
Paul wrote to the church at Philippi, "Being confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6).
God started this. He hasn't stopped. That's the whole promise in this verse, not that it's finished, but that He's still faithfully working, even in the waiting.
The berry on the bramble isn't being neglected. It's being ripened.
Every quiet day of sun and rain that looks like nothing is the exact thing making it sweet.
So if today looks the same as yesterday, if the situation is still sour and you're tempted to read that as proof God has forgotten, hold on.
He hasn't lost interest in you. He isn't finished. God is working, and He has never once left fruit on the branch to spoil.
Prayer.
Lord, You are working, even when I can't see it, even when nothing seems to be happening, even when I'm tempted to think You've forgotten or given up.
Trust is hardest when evidence is invisible, when I'm waiting without seeing progress, when circumstances look exactly the same as they did yesterday or last week.
Teach me that Your work often happens below the surface before it becomes visible, that seeds grow underground before they break through soil, that You're moving even in the silence.
Just because I don't see change doesn't mean You're not working, just because I don't feel progress doesn't mean You've stopped, just because I can't trace Your activity doesn't mean You're inactive.
Help me trust Your timing, Your methods, Your behind-the-scenes orchestration of details I know nothing about, the connections You're making, the preparations You're completing.
Remind me of times when I looked back and realized You were working all along, when pieces fell into place in ways I couldn't have arranged, when Your invisible work suddenly became visible.
Give me faith to trust You in the waiting, to believe You're working when I see nothing, to rest in Your activity instead of panicking over my inactivity.
Let me declare today with confidence that God is working, and I trust Him, not because I see proof but because I know His character and He's never stopped working yet.
In Jesus' name,
Amen.
