Harvest | Agrigultual Grace

Week Five: You get what you get, and you don't pitch a fit.

Agricultural Grace | A 5-Week Series

The image of a garden– sowing, planting, and nurturing seeds gives us a way to reflect on our own spiritual growth and the ways that grace shows up in our lives. Sometimes we need to be reminded that not everything is a quick fix. Growth takes time. Grace transforms. We plant seeds and wait with the truth that God is always with us.

Harvest

Mark 4:26-32

26 Then Jesus said, “This is what God’s kingdom is like. It’s as though someone scatters seed on the ground, 27 then sleeps and wakes night and day. The seed sprouts and grows, but the farmer doesn’t know how. 28 The earth produces crops all by itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full head of grain. 29 Whenever the crop is ready, the farmer goes out to cut the grain because it’s harvest time.”

30 He continued, “What’s a good image for God’s kingdom? What parable can I use to explain it? 31 Consider a mustard seed. When scattered on the ground, it’s the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; 32 but when it’s planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all vegetable plants. It produces such large branches that the birds in the sky are able to nest in its shade.”

Last spring, I planted two tomato plants and one pepper plant. Y’all, I’ve never worried and fussed over anything so much in my life. 

Am I watering them too much? Not enough? I started to read some garden blogs that said you were supposed to snip off the little shoots that come out of the main stem to make sure that your fruit is getting enough nutrients. What is considered a little shoot exactly? And the little card that came with my plants said that they needed full sun. What exactly does full sun mean? Can they not be in the shade ever? The sun moves! How does that work? 

Photo by Gregory Brainard on Unsplash

It was something else. And then I got little blooms that would never turn into anything because apparently they weren’t being pollinated. I fussed over, worried about, and cared for these little potted plants for months. FINALLY, I get little baby peppers and tomatoes that start to grow. I did it! Didn’t I?