On Planting and Sowing

A garden has two kinds of growth.  The first is the kind I like: plant a seed in spring, reap a harvest in summer, and the plant dies in the fall.  This happens with herbs, with vegetables, with tomatoes.  Sometimes a plant springs up the following year (my friend calls these "volunteers") when a seed from the previous year has fallen on fertile earth and creates something new.  I like it because you put in a little work, you get a pretty quick yield.  In only a matter of weeks, you have plump tomatoes and zesty herbs ripe for the picking, and you get to cook for a few months off this fresh produce from your own yard.

The second kind is harder for me, not because it's more work, but because it requires patience.  See, the second kind, generally fruits and flowers and trees, takes years to produce.  You drop a seed in the ground (or an indoor container) and the first year you watch it sprout and grow up.  I did this with strawberries.  The next spring, you have a plant, and that summer you might be lucky to get some produce.  Maybe 3 strawberries.  After the first year, I pulled the strawberry plants out the same as I did for the tomatoes, thinking I'd had a bust year.  Then my farmer grandpa told me I needed to leave them in the garden.  To let winter come and wait.  Now the following spring, the third, or even fourth year that you have been tending this plant, you start to get some good yield.  You get pints of strawberries, you get bushels of peaches.  And with a little work, some pruning, some watering, you will continue to reap from this plant that took so much more time to grow.

I went out in the yard and picked 25 strawberries today.  That's in addition to the 20 or so I picked yesterday, the 15 I picked the day before that.  And there are still more growing on the plants.  I don't like to wait, to tend something that isn't immediately producing.  Yet I am reaping the benefits of long-term gardening this summer.  This analogy fits more areas of my life than I care to admit.  The visible, short term results are the ones I like.  The steady praise of a paycheck and a job with a definite start and end...so much more preferable than the daily work of raising children and developing a marriage, which pays nothing and only shows results after years of hard labor.  The work I can do on my own, whose gain is mine alone, I would choose over the efforts of a group, helping the ones who are straggling.  The thing I already know I can do, rather than the new thing that I will fail at before I get better.  What is safe instead of what requires risk.

There is a passage of Galatians which is very popular to teach to children about the Fruit of the Spirit.  Sunday school teachers use construction paper images of fruit and write them out: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.  No matter what your religion, we can all agree that these are admirable traits.  But note that they are called "fruit", implying that these are things which do not grow overnight, but must be cultivated year after year in order to be present in our lives?

I set a goal for myself this year, to develop better habits.  Most of it boils down to this quick turnaround, the easy out, the candy bar instead an apple, the evening spent in front of the computer rather than face to face with another person.  And yet my pastor keeps repeating this verse from Isaiah-- "Behold I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."  God is all about breaking old patterns and making things new again.  So I need to be as well.  There's been lots planted in my life, gifts and privilege and accessibility.  I need to look for long term fruit, for the berries that don't come quickly and easily.  I need to tend the plants that take many seasons to produce.