Lessons From My Gardenنموونە

Seeds In the cold days of January, my favorite mail begins arriving—the seed catalogs! Sure, I can find and purchase everything online nowadays, but I love the colorful layouts of flowers and vegetables the catalogs provide. Flipping through the glossy pages I daydream, imagining warmer days with those beautiful images in my own fallow plots. Excitedly and with great hope, I place my order. But when it arrives it is not the finished product represented by those lovely catalog pictures. All I receive is seeds. Seeds aren’t lovely. They are only neutral colored specks or corms, or kernels or beans. That’s all they are until they are planted into the soil and watered. Then, guess what happens? They die! You see, dying is the only way a seed will become more. After the seed is planted into the moist soil it swells and cracks, and loses its dry outer shell. It completely gives up its seed identity to become something with even greater value—a sprout! And that sprout sends out a long root and before you know it a stem pushes through the earth and tiny green leaves appear. Then, eventually flowers, and then fruit! This growth cycle is a miraculous transformation of death to life—a complete exchange of identities. Your life has the very same potential as that seed. You can choose to hold to your self-preserving, independent heart. Or you can allow it to die by placing it into the tender and capable hands of The Master Gardener who cares for that “seed” and exchanges it for a fruitful, abundant life. The dying happens in the daily giving up of what you want for yourself. It happens as you close your mouth when you want to give a string of words. It happens as you choose to see others as more important than yourself. Dying takes practice. Many times a day you will be given the choice to pick up your cross and follow Him, or choose your own natural, human desires. Sure, you’ll undergo difficult storms and will grow weary. But the wonderful thing about your willingness to give that dead “seed” to God is that the size of your trust or hope doesn’t matter! Trusting Him is the activation of your faith, and He will increase it beyond what you can even imagine—from death to life! The offering of yourself and your surrender to Him can only be multiplied and grown, for with God it is a spiritual impossibility to be diminished. He will produce in you all the blossoming, growth, and fruit you could have never produced on your own. He is the God of more than, of abundance, of magnificent goodness and glory. Will you place the “seed”—your heart—into His loving hands? He transforms everything we offer to Him. Never fear the loss of your identity by offering your whole heart to Him. It is only in the breaking that we are multiplied, and in the dying that our true life begins.