We may never see the fruit—plant anyway.

The people who began in 1163 to build Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris didn’t live to see its completion—and they didn’t expect to. In fact, a saying attributed to medieval cathedral builders is: “We plant trees under whose shade we will never sit.”

Beautiful churches are concrete expressions of faith. For centuries, the beauty of Gothic cathedrals and other great churches have moved countless hearts, including those with little or no experience of God, pointing them toward something transcendent. Thank goodness for those who came before us and recognized the value of building something beautiful for God, regardless of the cost.

It takes tremendous faith to dedicate your life and resources to a project from which you will receive no temporal reward. A cathedral is not built for the glory of one generation but for the worship of God and the benefit of generations to come. We, too, are called to take up our particular tasks in building the Kingdom of God, asking for no reward other than the confidence that we are doing the Lord’s will.

This kind of faith requires us to think beyond ourselves. Our current culture tends to measure success by immediate results: What did we accomplish? What did we gain? How many people noticed? But the Kingdom of God does not operate according to those measurements. Some of the most important work we do may bear fruit long after we are gone—and some of it may bear fruit in ways we will never know.

Whatever our particular vocation or responsibilities, we are all called to be disciples of Christ and to make disciples of Christ. In evangelization, our role is often simply to plant seeds, trusting that we may never see what the Holy Spirit does with them.

A parent who teaches a child to pray may never know how that prayer sustains the child decades later. A teacher may never know which lesson remains with a student for a lifetime. A friend may offer a word of encouragement that someone remembers years later when he or she desperately needs it. A person who quietly lives his faith at work may never know that a colleague was watching—and inspired to seek God because of it.

Building the Kingdom also means doing what is right and just even when we may never see the fruits of our labor or benefit from our sacrifices. Sometimes, in fact, doing what is right will cost us dearly. This is where we need unwavering faith and trust in the Lord.

There has never been, nor will there ever be, a more just and holy person to walk this earth than Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, He was crucified. By every worldly measure, His life ended in failure. Why should we expect anything different for ourselves?

But the Cross was not the end of the story. The sacrifice that appeared to accomplish nothing became the source of the world’s salvation.

That is the Christian hope. We are not responsible for seeing the entire plan. We are responsible for being faithful to the part God gives us.

We may not see the cathedral completed. We may never sit beneath the shade of the trees we plant. We may never know how many lives were changed by the seeds we scattered. But we are called to build anyway—to plant anyway—to sacrifice anyway—to trust anyway.

Because the Kingdom of God is not built in a single generation. We are building on foundations laid by those who came before us, and we are laying foundations for those who will come after us.

Our task is simply to be faithful builders.