Gardening the Soul: The Harvest, 1

A Fruitful Life

My dad was an enthusiastic gardener—and his kids and grandkids were his co-gardeners. His half-acre garden was gloriously, phenomenally productive. From mid-summer to late fall, we harvested bags brimming with sweet peas, string beans and broccoli; gunny-sacks stuffed with sweet corn, squash and potatoes; thirty-pound fruit boxes spilling over with tomatoes, beets and carrots; a pickup jammed with pumpkins; and on and on. Though his seeds only filled a couple of shoeboxes, the produce could not be contained in a pickup--would a semi-trailer have been enough?!

Dad kept pace with most garden work--until the harvest. Every year—to the dismay of my depression-raised dad—a sizeable amount of produce went unharvested. One day as we were leaving the farm, hot and tired but with a carload of vegetables, dad whined: "When are you going to get back and pick the rest of those beans? They're getting old.” A bit peeved, I teased: "What was that you said? `Thanks for helping?'" Dad heartily agreed with Jesus: The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few!

Even Mom became frustrated with the abundance—she had the task of cleaning and storing them. Though I had never heard my mom cuss, one day after Dad unloaded another pile of produce, she protested, "Al, what am I going to do with all these damn vegetables?!" (Dad tried to solve the problem of abundance by buying two refrigerators for his garage and an extra refrigerator for each of his kids! But the problem wasn't solved until he discovered that our local soup kitchen would gladly take his excess produce.)

The harvest is one of the most tangible miracles in our world. Laura Simon explains: "You drop a seed in the dirt, water it, and wait for it to sprout. That's kind of magical, don't you think? I mean, here's a seed, a tiny fleck of matter, smaller, in some cases than the period that will end this sentence. But in-side its insignificant little carcass are the makings of a five-foot-tall delphinium, say, with flowers so twinkling blue they'll make you suck in your breath."

The average ratio of harvested seeds to planted seeds in Biblical Palestine was about 8-1. When Jesus asserted that a fertile heart could produce a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sown, he envisioned a lavish productivity that would stun even my garden-wise father. God's goal is to make your life brim with marvelous fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentle-ness, and self-control. But it won’t happen until you humbly invite Him to take charge of your whole garden. Will you do that?