Encouragement for When You Can't See Progress
At my childhood home, we had a massive oak tree that towered over almost the entire yard. It housed squirrels and birds, provided shade as we played in the grass, and supported a tire swing we enjoyed for hours on end.
But I never noticed the tiny movements that made its branches stretch over the lawn or its roots dig deep into the earth. I never saw it grow, yet somehow that tree changed from a seed to a towering oak.
Apparently tiny movements add up.
In his book Essentialism, (which I highly recommend, by the way) Greg McKeown talks about how even the smallest progress motivates us to keep going. Small progress propels us forward. He cites business leaders and studies to demonstrate his point, but I didn’t need all that. I knew from my own experience that what he said was true.
Then I also realized that’s why motherhood can be so. freaking. hard.
When We Don’t See Progress
Some days—maybe even some months or years—we don’t see the progress, or at least what we define as progress. We crave small victories to give us a little momentum, but sometimes those wins feel elusive. Our kids still fight. They still wear diapers. I still resort to yelling when I promised I’d stop. The baby still wakes up at 3am. My house still looks like a disaster.
I’m six years into motherhood, and if I’m honest, I thought I’d see a lot more progress in some areas by now. Sure, all my kids are potty-trained (finally), and they can eat on their own (for the most part). I can look back over the years and see progress that’s happened. I can trace their physical growth on the measuring board on our wall and flip back in my homeschool planner to reassure myself that yes, they actually have learned something this year.
But in the day-to-day struggles, it’s much harder to see that growth. It’s hard to play the long game, to remember that at the end of the day when clothes are piled on the floor, the kids fight, and I (yet again) feel like I failed, all has not been lost. I strain my eyes as I look, but any movement forward seems to come with a few extra steps back.
Yet just because I can’t see the growth doesn’t mean the work is meaningless.
Sometimes change is so gradual, grown through years of watering and tending, that trying to look for it is like trying to watch an oak tree grow. You know in your head it’s growing, but sometimes the rate is so slow your heart starts to wonder if your head got it wrong. Yet while the limbs look feeble, the roots reach deeper. The leaves fall to the ground in autumn, but are reborn tenfold in spring. Summer heat and thunderstorms test that little tree, but the sun that gives heat and the rain that comes with storms is the same sun and the same rain that makes it grow.
Small progress, tiny movements, nearly unnoticeable changes...it adds up.
Other times, what we do doesn’t even look like growth. It’s the opposite. We’re cleaning up messes that will be made again. We’re pouring into people who can never reciprocate. We’re caring for someone who’s terminally ill. We’re doing things that to the world may seem futile. What’s the point if the progress can’t be measured? Why does our work matter if we’ll never see a result?
Your Labor is Not in Vain
Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:58, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
Our labor in the Lord is not in vain—and that includes motherhood. What we’re doing as we wash dishes, change diapers, teach reading, provide financially, make another meal, and do all the things that parenting requires of us is not in vain.
N.T. Wright puts it this way:
But what we can and must do in the present, if we are obedient to the gospel, if we are following Jesus, and if we are indwelt, energized, and directed by the Spirit, is to build for the kingdom. This brings us back to 1 Corinthians 15:58 once more: what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are—strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.”
Mama, you are not oiling the wheels of a machine about to go off a cliff. It feels like that sometimes when we don’t see what the world defines as progress or success. When our to-do list isn’t checked off or our life doesn’t measure up the way we think it should, it’s easy to grow discouraged. But when progress isn’t possible or our work feels pointless, we can rest assured that our labor in the Lord is not in vain.
Wright continues:
Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God. God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and in the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted.
Your work is not wasted. The oak tree grows even when we can’t see it. Those tiny movements lead to a towering tree standing tall and strong and beautiful in front of us. Sometimes, we get to see that growth this side of eternity. Other times, we will have to wait until God reveals it to us in the new creation.
But I believe wholeheartedly that one day—maybe in this life but definitely in the next—we’ll see that the small steps done in obedience to God have added up. Work done to love him and love others has not disappeared. The endless and often monotonous tasks of motherhood matter, and we won’t just see the growth of oak tree. We’ll see a forest that testifies to the work of God. We’ll see growth we didn’t even dream of, change we couldn’t have imagined, a result only God could orchestrate.
And so we can keep going, one step at a time, knowing that even when progress looks invisible, the oak tree still grows.
An version of this post was originally published for the Coffee + Crumbs newsletter.
Photo by rethink twice on Unsplash.
