“For as the soil makes
the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the
Sovereign LORD will make righteousness and praise spring up
before all nations.” Isaiah 61:1
“Look at this big pepper!” I shout with
child-like exuberance to my husband who is at the opposite end of the garden. This
year’s bounty of green peppers was disappointingly scarce and I was excited to finally
have some. “Look how long this green bean is!” he shouts back to me. As we start
the process of harvesting one final time, God helped me to understand
connections between our garden and daily struggles in life.
We pick the last of the green
beans, jalapenos, sweet peppers, and tomatoes and place in plastic grocery bags
before the forecasted frost kills our garden plants. I have mixed emotions:
excited to have more garden vegetables and melancholy to know the gardening
season is over. I regret that time and energy prevented us from tending our
garden lately because of a change in jobs for my husband and school starting
for me. I fear that our tomatoes and
peppers aren’t salvageable due to our lack of time spent taking care of them.
As I start to walk through the rows, the first
thing I notice is the black, mushy, rotten tomatoes and over-growing vines. I realize that my spiritual and financial life
needs tending like the plants in our garden. If I am not careful, I will end up
with wasted opportunities and rotten produce if I don’t tend to my “garden” of
daily life.
“Pick everything that you want
because it won’t be any good after this weekend,” my husband tells me, as I
walk around sprawling vines and try to avoid the damaged tomatoes scattered on
the ground. It surprises me that the bad tomatoes are right next to the good –
even on the same plant. I am reminded of the natural balance of good and bad,
yin and yang, even when sometimes the bad seems to outweigh the good. This was
God’s way of telling me that there is hope and not to be discouraged. Good
fruit is right around the corner.
Next to healthy tomato plants, we
find a plant that is brown, wilted and pitiful looking - certainly dead. Sometimes, my spirit feels like this brown and
wilted plant: hopeless and certainly not productive. However, I push aside the
dead leaves and dig a little deeper, delighted to find a perfectly shaped,
sweet, vine-ripened tomato that was hidden from sight on a seemingly dead
plant.
One bad thing happens after another
and it seems like there is no hope for fruit.
Even when our spirit seems dead and wilted, we CAN produce something
worthwhile with God’s nourishing light shining down on us, like the perfect
tomatoes hidden under the wilted leaves. Sometimes, we just have to push away the dead
and decaying leaves of our past and try harder to find the perfect fruit of our
tomorrow.
As we fill up eight plastic bags of
our vegetables, I make my way to the edge of the garden literally saying
“Goodbye” to the garden for one more season, realizing that change is part of
life. There are cold wintery seasons in which challenges and upsets will occur.
Remember, though, next spring the seedlings will thrust toward the heavens and
brown will slowly turn to green. God’s faithful will overcome life’s obstacles and
start to see the bounty of His blessings again, in our freshly tilled garden of
life.
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