By Jessica Brodie

Have you ever found yourself doing something you had no intention of doing? Standing on a roof in Summerton, South Carolina, the heat creeping ever closer to the hundred-degree mark, I found myself looking at the scraps of shingles and roof paper all around me with a wave of discouragement.

I didn’t plan to be on that roof. I was there as part of a multiperson team for Salkehatchie Summer Service, a mission I’ve been involved with personally for the past four years, with my husband and our kids joining me to spend a week doing home repairs for people struggling to have safe shelter in our state. Still, I’d hoped to be working on the ground like I did last year, not sweating off my sunscreen on a roof in July. But we didn’t have quite enough people to do the roof work this year, so there I was.

If not for the heat, the work would have been tons of fun. Roofing is something I find surprisingly enjoyable, as you can demolish a rotten surface and then put it back together all in just a couple of days if you have a well motivated team to work with. Even in the heat, I found myself having a good time.

Still, the task was daunting. The roof needed to get down to bare wood in order to be properly fixed. All of those tiny little scraps of paper had to come off, and the heat was getting to me. The shingles weren’t so hard, as they came off in big, manageable strips. But the paper tended to flake off. Not only that, but massive roofing nails held the paper down, and I had to take those out, too.

All around me, strong teens and twenty-somethings seemed to have no problem with the task, but my back ached, and my toes were jammed to the front of my sneakers since we worked at a severe incline. It seemed like a project we’d never get finished, yet we hoped to have the work done by 6 p.m., otherwise we’d have to tarp it to keep water from an overnight rain from destroying everything. (Tarping was just as much work.)

Resigned to the seemingly endless task, I edged to the side of the roof and began scraping away slowly, methodically, one column at a time.

What do you know? Before I knew it, we’d scraped half away, and then the whole thing. By sunset, the paper was on and we’d started shingling.

It reminds me of our faith journey. Sometimes we look at an arduous task or a seemingly impossible situation, unable to see the end, and find ourselves filled with despair. Perhaps it’s a financial catastrophe we cannot see our way through, or a health or marriage crisis, or some other seemingly impossible situation.

We have a choice then—decide we can’t do it and give up, or trust that God will provide, and press ahead in persistence.

Persistent faith is, of course, the better way. But it’s hard. Isn’t it? It’s hard to trust that God will do what he promised, what we’re asking of him, what we desire in his name.

The Bible is filled with stories of people with persistent faith. Moses left Egypt and led the Israelites through the wilderness for 40 years, relying on an unseen God. The Canaanite woman from Matthew 15 kept asking Jesus to heal her daughter despite being ignored and tested. The apostle Paul urged, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9 NIV).

That day in Summerton, the finished roof wasn’t the result of one heroic push. It came from a bunch of tired, sweaty people scraping away one column at a time, trusting the end would come even when we couldn’t see it. That’s what persistent faith looks like—not the absence of discouragement, but the decision to keep scraping anyway.

Whatever roof you’re standing on right now, whatever task looms too large to finish, don’t look at the whole thing. Just do the next column. God sees the finished work even when all we can see are scraps of paper and stubborn nails.

Press on, friends. The harvest is coming.

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