(I blew the dust off of this old blog post to share it here today. First published August 2016).
Our vegetable garden is producing baskets full of blessings daily! My husband and I got a late start in planting, but we’re both amazed at how well it’s doing.
He worked for several days transforming my neglected, weed-filled flower garden into a sun-loving, vegetable-producing haven. He tilled and tilled and tilled once more adding several wheel barrows full of composted chicken manure from the coop until finally…he was satisfied that the soil was ready to go.
We planted zucchini, crook-neck squash, watermelon, green onions, English cucumbers, several rows of various peppers and chilies, sweet corn now 10-feet tall and a pot full of culinary herbs. It’s amazing and a lot of fun.
One of the things I’ve learned over many years of gardening is, whether growing a space overflowing with vegetables or a flower-filled paradise for butterflies and hummingbirds, the garden forces us to be patient. It forces us to watch and wait and during all that watching and waiting, the garden doesn’t forget to grow. It doesn’t forget to produce or bloom. It just takes time…precious, necessary time.
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time
we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. (Galatians 6:9)
When we’re waiting for the blessings to emerge, it’s easy to believe that nothing is happening, when in fact there’s so much happening beneath the soil that we never see. The root structure forms gaining in size and strength to support the weight of the blessing; each little component reaching, searching through the soil undeterred by every obstacle because that which is planted in fertile soil will, in fact, produce and bless.
But if we hope for what we do not yet have,
we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:25)
The enemy wants you to believe that your prayers, your hopes and dreams have gone stagnant and now lie on deaf ears, but God hasn’t forgotten to bless you. He IS blessing you. Sometimes, the blessings aren’t out in the open…yet. Maybe they’re a little hidden, growing the necessary root structure and waiting to be revealed at just the right time. And when God sheds His perfect, beautiful light on your blessings, you’ll see that they are bigger and more amazing than your dreams allowed you to imagine.
Blessings come in all shapes and sizes, my friend. But all require time spent in fertile soil and, of course…a bit of SONshine.
Don’t. Give. Up.
Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop,
some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times." (Mark 4:8)
