“I nearly gave up on homeschooling last week.” I sat in the midst of friends, all of us sipping hot tea, munching popcorn. If I was honest, it wasn’t only homeschooling that I felt like throwing the towel in for. All of us mamas sat around that room with an air of honesty, speaking of how difficult it feels to press on. Mamahood does this to us. It demands that we give everything we have to give, plus some. Then it demands the same tomorrow.

I won’t soon forget the words that my friend Nancy shared that night. Her children who she also educated at home are grown now. She was honest about how she often felt liking giving up too. But then she shared that somewhere in the midst of the hardships, she felt the switch. She can look back and see specifically when she could finally glimpse it: the fruit. “It was worth it,” she shared with a smile, “I could finally see it.”

That is what I am holding out for.

I’ve often pictured myself in the shoes of the Proverbs 31 woman standing at the edge of an empty field. We read it in Proverbs 31:16, “She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.” I’ve stood looking over that field — rock-hard clay, bramble, weeds and all — and dared to ask what God might want to do with it. What vineyard might He want to make of my motherhood?

Yet it wasn’t until recently that I came across a second field in Proverbs, this one quite different.

“I passed by the field of a sluggard,
by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
the ground was covered with nettles,
and its stone wall was broken down.
Then I saw and considered it;
I looked and received instruction.” Proverbs 24:30-32

Those words, “lacking sense”, struck me. Drawn back to their Hebrew roots, it’s not an intellectual deficiency that they speak to. Instead, 508 time this word is used throughout Scripture to speak of the “inner man”. It refers to our heart and inclination, “a seat of courage.” It’s not that this man didn’t know how to pull a weed or sow a seed. He lacked the heart to cultivate that field.

I don’t believe that any of us mamas lack heart when it comes to cultivating the souls of our children. Yet motherhood with all of its doubts, insecurities, fears, comparisons, and discouragements can often leave us lacking heart. Our soul feels downright eroded by the daily labor of it all, and the lack of visible fruit. Harvest can feel terribly far away.

“Let us not lose heart in doing good,” Galatians 6:9 instructs, “for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.”

I am trusting that there is fruit held in the seeds of time. I see it in the faces of mamas with children grown, moved onto lives of their own, and I hold to that promise. I look into the eyes of my own children and I see the potential in that weathered field, and that brings me back to the soil. This, I believe, is how we keep heart: we show up. We come to the edge of that field and pull our gloves on. We press shovel into dirt, sow seeds into the soil of time, weed out what will choke the fruit, and wait.

“So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything,” 1 Corinthians 3:7 tells us, “but God who causes the growth.” It is He who brings the fruit forth from those branches, He only calls us to show up for the work of motherhood, and to trust that He will make much of it.

Our labor is not in vain.