How Does Your Garden Grow?

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Title: How Does Your Garden Grow?

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Ecclesiastes 3:1 “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

My mother was such an amazing gardener that I used to think she could plant cotton balls and grow cotton! My uncles would bring their tractors each spring and plow up about a quarter or half an acre of ground for Mom’s garden. I didn’t know and still don’t know much about gardens, but Mom sure did.

Although not patient by nature, Mom was the very soul of patience with that garden. She would plant and water, hoe and weed, and work that garden every single day. She loved the entire package and trusted that in the process of time, her effort would yield a harvest. It always did, but it took diligence and hard work for the fruit of that garden to develop from the seeds she planted. It also took time.

The best things do take time, don’t they? And trying to grow something is certain to take time because growth is a process. It doesn’t happen immediately. That’s why we are admonished in 1 Peter 2:2 to be like babies desiring “the sincere milk of the word so we will grow.” The growing season for a garden spans weeks or months because it takes time for that seed to develop and mature and produce fruit.

We totally understand that about a garden. But we tend sometimes to forget that spiritual and emotional growth take time as well. It starts with the seed of faith. Then we are admonished to be diligent about adding to that faith. (2 Pet 1:5) So many times I’ve seen new Christians or people who are new in recovery throw up their hands and quit because they expected immediate maturity, immediate growth, immediate success. And growth just doesn’t work that way.

My mother didn’t expect to pick corn or green beans two days after she planted the garden. That would have been silly. But it’s no less silly for us to expect a fully developed spiritual garden when we’ve just planted the seeds. Instead of looking in dismay at how far we have to go, we would do better to look back at how far we’ve come. That little green sprout may not be much compared to the mature corn stalk, but it has it hands down over the untilled ground.

It takes patience to grow a beautiful and fruitful garden. It also takes patience to make a beautiful life out of the wreckage of our past. And it’s not just recovering people who have wreckage. We all do, and we can’t make it something beautiful on our own. Even though Mom worked that garden, she knew God gave the increase. That’s true in our daily walk as well.

We need to be diligent to weed out the unacceptable things in our lives and to nourish and feed the good things. And when we do those things, God is faithful to cause that seed of faith to grow into something wonderful. Others may see our growth more clearly than we do, and that’s ok. We can let them believe in us until we can believe in ourselves. And we can trust the process, knowing God isn’t finished with us yet.

Challenge for Today: What might happen if we, just for today, stopped beating ourselves up, looked at how far we’ve come, and remembered that growth is a process?