Waiting for Fruit
It has been an almost unendurably hot summer! Many trees in my neighborhood are brown and crispy. Even the heat-loving vegetables in my garden have struggled to produce. It was even too hot for my okra! The temperature has exposed weakness in the care we give the plants that don’t really belong in the desert. And it has revealed character flaws in the rest of us! Biting back words of accusation when someone fails to put up the all-important windshield shade screen, jockeying for the shady parking spot, laundry needing to be rewashed because it was too hot to go outside and hang it up…
Waiting for the plants to produce the desired fruit has been an exercise in persistence, every day checking for beans. Blossoms we had…beautiful butterfly-looking things of lavender and pale yellow…but no beans. I mulched the plants, fed them fish emulsion, watered them, spoke to them, prayed over them and enjoyed the beauty of the flowers, but went back inside dejected. They kept growing, just not bearing any of the twelve-to-eighteen inch beans that I hoped would be feeding us. Rats.
Lord, is this how You feel waiting for us to produce the fruit that shows the world how amazing You are?
When the overnight lows dropped down below 95°, suddenly there were beans developing, pods forming on the okra, squash beginning to appear on the volunteers (the ones that sprouted from the unfinished compost I had to remove from the broken composters). Then I came upon a bean that gave me new appreciation for the ability to endure trials: this bean ran into an immovable obstacle. What did it do? It turned around and went the other way! It did a 180 and kept growing! Another one grew into a spiral shape as it worked its way around the trellis.
Lord, help me to be as persistent as this green bean! I want to keep growing in the face of — and because of — trouble. When I run into an obstacle, give me the courage and the power to keep moving on in the design You have for me. I want to produce the fruit that You are looking for. And thanks for the okra and beans!
Still following Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
P.S. How are you growing? Is it time for fruit? Or still waiting?
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