Five Hundred Yards at a Time

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne arrives at prison clutching a rock hammer barely larger than his fist. The guards laugh at it. What could such a tool accomplish against walls three feet thick? The answer, it turns out, was everything — given enough time.

Night after night, for nineteen years, Andy carved into the concrete behind a pinup poster in his cell. Each morning he stuffed the dust into his pant legs and shook it loose in the yard, invisible progress to anyone who wasn't looking for it. He never rushed. He never panicked. He simply showed up, kept working, kept trusting that small faithfulness would become something larger than he could yet see.

When he finally crawled five hundred yards through a sewer line and emerged into a rainstorm with his arms raised toward the sky, it wasn't a miracle of brute force. It was the miracle of patient, sustained endurance — one night at a time, one handful of dust at a time.

The Scriptures know this rhythm well. "Let us not grow weary of doing good," Paul writes in Galatians, "for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up." The harvests of God's purposes almost never arrive on our timetable. They accumulate quietly, grain by grain, behind the poster we pin up just to get through another day.

Whatever long waiting you are carrying today, take heart. The Almighty is not slow — He is precise. And your faithful endurance is never wasted.