Today, as I was pondering over some of the lessons of today, I was reminded of the words of Paul, quoted from 1 Corinthians 9:10: “He who plows should plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should be partaker of his hope.” In life, often the results of our labors are not necessarily something we will see immediately. In fact, the fruits of our labor may be months or years or even generations after we are done. If we do not have hope that our efforts will eventually pay off, we will not labor long enough to receive those rewards. In short, if the rewards for our labors take a sufficient amount of time, then we require persistence, as well as an accurate understanding of rewards, in order to achieve the goals that we have set out for ourselves, to pay the price of our labors.

About three years ago, I wrote some encyclopedia articles for a publisher about American involvement in Latin America as well as the Civil War, both areas of research interest for me [1]. None of these articles took an extremely long time to write, and they came with a fee of about $500 per article. This sort of money can quickly add up, and given that I am not a particularly wealthy person, it represents a pretty substantial return for the labor of an evening of writing (at my pace) along with research in areas that I would enjoy reading for their own sake anyway. Given these circumstances, it would appear obvious that writing in such a fashion would be a no-brainer, given the minimal amount of incremental effort for a fairly substantial reward given my current standard of living, right? Everyone who has the ability and the opportunity to write entries should do so as much as possible, right? So what’s the catch?

The catch is a rather straightforward one, and that is the length of time between the work and the reward. I wrote these encyclopedia entries at the beginning of 2011, and I have still not gotten paid anything at all for these articles. So, what we see here is a significant time lag between the effort and the reward. If this time lag is too long, even the promise of relatively high reward for relatively low amounts of effort may not be sufficient to make it worth the hassle of sending someone endless address changes in between the work and the disbursement of payment. Yet with a sufficient amount of persistence, the benefits far outweigh the hassles. It would appear then, that in those areas where the reward takes a long time to come, especially an uncertain time, that there is a certain amount of hope and faith in a positive outcome to keep one’s effort through until the payoff. Obviously, this has relevance in a lot of areas of life, from personal improvement to financial success to efforts in difficult areas like courtship and one’s social life. Sometimes the things we seek are a long time in coming, and we only gain the rewards if we continue in hope and faith and do not despair.

At least part of that process involves looking at the context. It is hard to see exactly what is going on in our lives, and I certainly do not understand exactly what is going on with mine. Nevertheless, if we can properly estimate the benefits that we seek along with a reasonable estimate of the sort of persistence it is likely to take to achieve those goals, we can be much more resolute. It is perhaps for this reason that the language the Bible uses when it speaks of its rewards is so massive in nature. While Job, for example, got double his property back after his trial, Jesus Christ promised His believers a hundredfold gain for all of the losses suffered in our lives in the world to come. After all, since the world to come seems so far off, the gains must be massive in order to compensate for the long lag between labor and reward. Having a vision of a better future that is reasonably accurate can give us the encouragement we need to persevere in the face of the time it takes for our rewards to pay off, and not only when it comes to writing encyclopedia entries either.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/a-walking-encyclopedia/