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 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.
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