Do not grow weary
(or so they say.)

I grew up in the church, so this verse is familiar to me. A little too familiar. It's the kind of scripture that gets stitched onto pillows and printed on bulletins, handed to you gently when you're tired, like a spiritual energy bar. Don't quit. Keep going. The harvest is coming.

But that verse never came alone. It came with company — the whole family of "good Christian behavior" scriptures that raised me right alongside it. If someone slaps your right cheek, turn and give them your left one too. Forgive, and while you're at it, forgive again. Then forgive seventy-seven times seven. In a day. A day. I was taught to absorb, to soften, to keep pouring out grace like I had an endless well of it, and to trust that somewhere down the line, God was keeping score in my favor.

I believed it. I built a whole way of moving through the world around it.

But today, we're not talking about the cheek-turning or the seventy-seven-times-seven forgiving — because that's the one I'm currently wrestling with. Not because I've stopped believing it, exactly. But because I'm standing in the middle of my life looking at the evidence, and the evidence is not exactly cooperating with the promise.

Here's my confession: doing good doesn't always get you the outcome you envisioned. Sometimes it doesn't get you any outcome at all. Meanwhile, I'm watching people who have never once concerned themselves with "doing good" reap the exact things I've been holding my breath for — while doing considerably less than me. Less patience. Less self-sacrifice. Less turning of any cheeks whatsoever. Just being. Just doing whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and somehow the harvest found them anyway.

Furious like Mojo Jojo.

I think I've been writing this whole essay with the energy of Mojo Jojo. If you know, you know — the guy who is furious, monologuing at the sky, equal parts brilliant and undone, mad at the world and a little mad at himself too. That's where I am. Furious at the world for not honoring the deal I thought I signed. And furious at myself, if I'm honest, for not being a little more forward-thinking. A little more ruthless. A little more self-centered — and my self-centered is already sitting at a solid level, so we're talking about turning it up a notch, not introducing it for the first time.

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about wanting more for your life: wanting it is not the same as being taught how to go get it. I was taught to do good and wait. I was not taught to negotiate, to protect my time like currency, to say no without an apology stapled to it, to build instead of just believe. I was given the seed and told to be patient with the ground. Nobody mentioned that some people just skip the planting altogether and still walk away with fruit.

The deal I never actually signed.

So where does that leave someone like me — someone who did the good, who is still doing the good, and is watching it get her nowhere? Or nowhere slowly, which might be worse, because nowhere slowly still asks you to keep showing up for it.

I don't have a bow to put on this one. I'm not going to tell you that the harvest is definitely coming, because I don't know that, and I'm exhausted by people who speak in certainties about outcomes they haven't lived yet. What I do know is this: I'm not interested in abandoning goodness just because it hasn't paid out on my timeline. But I am done being naive about what goodness actually guarantees. It never guaranteed outcomes. It was never a transaction. Somewhere along the way I turned a way of being into a business deal with God, and I think what I'm really grieving right now is the deal, not the goodness itself.

Softness and sharpness, both.

Maybe the work isn't choosing between being good and being strategic. Maybe it's learning to hold both — the softness that forgives and keeps showing up, and the sharpness that knows my time, my energy, and my "yes" are not infinite resources to be handed out to anyone who slaps a cheek. Maybe growing up doesn't mean I stop doing good. Maybe it means I stop doing it blindly, and start doing it on purpose, with my eyes open, expecting nothing from anyone except myself.

I'm still grappling. I'm not going to pretend otherwise, not on this blog. But I'd rather be honest and mid-figure-it-out than pretend I've arrived somewhere I clearly haven't.