Sappy for Jesus: The Sweeter Side of Patience

Each spring, my family enters into our regular muddy adventure: Sapping Season. When the days start warming above freezing but the nights still stay frosty, this is the perfect weather for the maple trees to start sharing their sap at my parents’ acreage in Wisconsin. A few weeks before this change of weather, when it’s still below freezing basically 24/7, the trees need to be tapped. This requires trudging out in the snow or ice or mud (Wisconsin is quite unpredictable from January to about May; who am I kidding, it’s pretty unpredictable most of the time) to individually tap every tree. Then, tubing lines have to be run, so that the sap can run into buckets. Then the sap needs to be collected. Then the sap needs to be cooked. For hours, and hours, and hours… For every 40 cups of sap you collect, you get roughly 1 cup of syrup. 1 cup. That’s it.

                While making maple syrup for years has given me the opportunity to learn many values (hard work, perseverance, team work, etc.) it has persistently taught me one thing… patience. And lot’s of it! Now, ask anyone who knows me, patience is not at the top of my virtue list. Or probably at the bottom either. It’s an ongoing process for me, but trust me, making maple syrup will give you a good dose of “patience 101”, whether you want it or not! The entire process is tedious and sometimes pain-stakingly slow. You need to be very attentive to the sap while it cooks, because, although it take forever and a day to cook the sap to the right consistency to make syrup, you also don’t want to let it cook too long, because it only takes a few moments for your beloved batch of syrup to turn into maple candy, and it’s really, really sad when that happens.

                All silliness aside, making maple syrup is incredibly awesome. You get the chance to see God’s beauty in creation, and how amazingly creative and, dare I say sweet, He really is. To see this water like substance leave a tree to turn into the delicious syrup we love on our pancakes, it’s really neat! But it truly is a testament to patience. We have burned some pretty big batches of syrup, where 800 gallons of sap ended up being ruined! After all the collecting, the wood cutting, the stove stoking, the hours of cooking… Ooo, it really hurts when that syrup burns! But again, as crazy as it sounds, it’s a tiny, tiny glimpse into the patience Jesus has for us. Goodness, think of the hundreds of times I have committed the same sin, over and over! It makes the hours of wasted work and hundreds of gallons of wasted sap seem like nothing! The patience of the Lord is truly inspiring, and hopefully moves us to beg Him for a fraction of His patience! Ephesians 4:2 states it best, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” I truly believe that old saying, “good things come to those who wait”. Waiting is the exercise of patience, the way to strengthen that patience muscle, no matter how little it may be! So, if you feel the same way about patience as I do, just remember: the same way that delicious syrup is worth the work, struggle, and wait, Jesus has many gifts in store for those who practice patience.