Harvesting the Garden, Part 2

The Delayed Harvest

One of the surest principles of the harvest is its delay. I can't pick beans the day after I sow bean seeds. Newly planted asparagus roots won't produce a significant crop for two or three years. Our sapling oak trees will provide a canopy of shade for our great-grandchildren’s play!

It is the slow, steady growth of trees that most resembles God's work—though the wicked spring up like grass, the righteous will flourish like a palm tree and will become oaks of righteousness. (Ps.92) One of the delightful oaks that has been growing in my life is the relationship that I enjoy with my three adult sons and their families. We share holidays and meals, gardening and golf, work and worship. What fed this splendid growth? The growth of it was painstakingly nurtured ring by ring and inch-by-inch.

• Ring #1: Playing most of my golf with my young sons rather than my friends. (By the second hole they were hot, frustrated, and ready to dash to the swimming pool.)
• Ring #2: Working with my boys in a small lawn care business. (I could have earned more money and suffered less grief—“Dad, do we have to mow today? It's too hot!"—if I had worked on my own.)
• Ring #3: Establishing my office at home. (I could have written several more books if I had located my office away from their frequent interruptions.)
• Ring #4:  Coaching my sons' athletic teams. (Doesn't everyone love a task that involves griping parents, incompetent  referees, and rowdy children?!)
• Ring #5: Vacationing as a family. (I would have preferred more romantic get-aways with my wife!)

Parenting makes remarkable demands but has few instant rewards. My boys didn't slap me on the back and say, "Wow! You're sure a great dad to give up your Saturday golf game to play golf with us." None of my golfing friends, who watched my handicap balloon to an eight from a two, said, "I think it's great to see a father put his kids first." So why did I persevere? Because I was confident that planting those choice seeds would one day produce a delightful harvest.

Harvesting the Garden

My dad was a zealous 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, gunnysacks 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 dad could keep pace with most garden work, the harvest overwhelmed him. 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 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 would get 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 inside 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 harvest is breathtaking. Dad’s annual supply of seeds barely filled a shoebox. But the harvest couldn't be contained in the back end of a pickup—would a semi-trailer have been enough?!

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, gentleness, and self-control. But it won’t happen until you humbly invite Him into your garden and ask Him to take charge.