God Quote by Lewis J. Bates

Bad years have a way of feeling like moral evidence: the weeds are thriving, the good work is failing, and the universe is quietly taking sides. Lewis J. Bates pushes back against that instinct by re-framing catastrophe as timing rather than verdict. The opening image is agrarian and unsentimental: “tares” (biblical weeds) don’t just appear, they “grow strong,” while “Hope” doesn’t merely dim, it “starves.” The personification is doing crucial work here. Hope isn’t a virtue you can summon on command; it’s a living thing that can be neglected, outcompeted, and made fragile by conditions beyond your control.

Then comes the hinge: “But God’s time is our harvest time.” Bates is writing in a register familiar to Protestant hymnody and 19th-century moral verse, where the farm is a cosmic classroom and delayed gratification is both theology and social instruction. The line is less about optimism than about discipline: don’t mistake the present season for the final accounting. The subtext is partly pastoral (comfort for people in drought, depression, grief), partly corrective (a warning against despair and rash judgment), and partly political in the broad sense: if you believe history has a moral arc, you can endure ugly chapters without treating them as the whole book.

“And that is sure to come” lands like a refrain meant to be memorized under pressure. The certainty is the point: faith here isn’t a mood, it’s a calendar.