Thirty-five years ago, Thomas Daigle and his wife signed a home loan. On the way out of the bank, he found a penny on the ground. On a lark, they said they should save pennies to pay off their loan. Decades later, they had amassed 62,000 pennies. They hauled the accumulated coins to a bank teller to finish off their mortgage’s balance. It took bank employees 2 days to count the coins, but the Daigles’ mortgage was no more.

Proverbs speaks of ants as a noble example of the plodding power of simple diligence—sticking to your work day after day (Proverbs 30:25). Ants are fascinating. If you sit near one of their colonies and watch them in action, they’re a wonder. Tiny creatures, it takes them an hour to cover ground that would be only a few steps for me. Yet they stick to their laborious task. Even if I tire watching them, they will still be busy hours later when I return.

Ants aren’t powerful creatures. They don’t strike fear in your bones as a lion would, and they don’t have the strength of a rhino or the speed of a cheetah. However, ants quietly do what needs to be done. They survive through the winter with the nourishment they need because they continue the tedious preparation in the “summer” (Proverbs 30:25).

Our lives are often the action of ants. It seems as if we’re simply trudging through our duties. Hour after hour, it seems that we’re making little to no progress. We wonder if our tedium matters. We grow weary of much work and little result (Proverbs 30:1).

However, we work for the One who is Lord over the earth (Proverbs 30:4), the One who sees the end. Keep working. Keep watching.

NLT 365-day reading plan passage for today: Luke 2:21-39