Eventide & Altar

I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth. Paul says it to settle an argument, but it holds up as something much larger than a settling of an argument. It's a description of almost every important thing you've ever done for someone else - a child raised, a friend prayed for across decades, a marriage tended through years that didn't look like much from the outside.

You did the planting. You did a great deal of watering, probably longer than felt reasonable, in stretches where nothing visible was happening at all. And the growth, when it came, came from somewhere past your reach. That's not a diminishment of the work you did. It's the truth about what the work actually was.

At this point you've likely watched the whole arc play out at least once - the years of sowing that seemed to go nowhere, followed much later by a harvest you didn't see coming and couldn't have engineered. A grandchild who comes back to the Church on her own timeline. A son who calls, decades on, to say he finally understands something you tried to tell him at seventeen. None of that was yours to produce. All of it was yours to plant.

In the Gospel, Jesus heals Simon's mother-in-law and she gets up immediately to serve. There's no recovery period, no easing back in. Healing here restores her straight into the life she'd been living before the fever - back to the people, back to the work of caring for them. That's worth praying over tonight if you're carrying someone through a long illness, your own or someone else's: ask not just for healing, but for however much strength it takes to get back to what matters most to them.

The Glorious Mysteries tonight - Wednesday's traditional day, and Saint Joseph's as well. Pray them for the growth you planted and watered years ago and have not yet seen come in.

• For all who have planted faith in someone else and are still waiting to see it take root, that they would trust the timing they cannot control, we pray to the Lord.
• For those who are sick or recovering, that Christ would raise them up the way he raised Simon's mother-in-law, we pray to the Lord.
• For grandparents whose quiet faithfulness across many years is still bearing fruit they may never see in this life, we pray to the Lord.

Write a short note tonight to someone you planted something in a long time ago - faith, a skill, a piece of advice - whether or not you've ever seen it grow. Tell them what you remember planting. Don't ask for an update. Just tell them you remember.