Like Watching Grass Grow

“15 As for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.” (Luke 8)

When Rabbit ran out to get snacks and cream soda before the game, he paused the DVR so he wouldn’t miss the first pitch.  When Tortoise ran out to get snacks and sarsaparilla, he packed an overnight bag.  Some things move fast.  Some things…not so much.  God worked on Moses and Joshua eighty years before their hearts and the timing was right for their calling.  Samuel and Jeremiah were just kids when God came a knockin’.  Jesus spent three years training the disciples, no more than that and quite possibly less with Paul and the Holy Spirit came upon John the Baptist in the womb!  All this is to say, God’s timing is not ours.

Much of this is perception.  To an assembly line worker with little reason to hope for and less ambition to ever being much more than an assembly line worker, one day is nothing.  It’s just one more day.  To a mayfly, it’s a lifetime and life is frighteningly short.  Same twenty-four hour period, the emphasis comes from us.  Make that same assembly line worker a mother with her in-laws coming to visit for the first time tomorrow and she suddenly sympathizes with the mayfly.

Some of us have distinct, marvelous, miraculous conversions.  We can name the date.  Friends (and former friends) can say, “Yeah, they used to fill in the blank but then they found Jesus.”  Praise God, He filled in the blank with His Body and Blood!  The change felt like it happened in an instant.  God’s Spirit crashed on us like a wave!  We emerged from the water something totally new.  Now we are in the glorious Anno Domini Nostri Iesu! 

Others of us, myself included, it’s a bit murkier.  Raised in the church, I have always believed and felt myself to be a child of God.  There was no date I can point to as Before Christ.  It’s been more of a climb on a wooded mountain with stunning overlooks to show me how far God has brought me.  A fitful, uneven learning process in God’s school of Grace for a woeful student.  Some of our journeys will look like Rabbit’s with Mayfly’s sense of the shortness of time.  Some of us will plod along like Tortoise, barely sensing the distance traveled or the time passing.  We will blink and open our eyes in eternity.  Albeit we will go through times of both.

And Jesus knows this.  Heck, this is the first time I’ve read the Parable of the Sower and noticed the word “patience” at the end.  Which leads me to wonder, whose patience are we talking about here?  The soil’s or the Sower’s?

So to fruit and farmers.  Mark doesn’t include the word “patience.”  Instead, he follows the Parable of the Sower with a parable Luke does not.  “26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4)  This is not a picture of instant gratification.  Whoever the Farmer is here, Jesus or us, and I could make arguments for either so God being God, it’s probably both, he does not expect fruit the same day he drops the seed.  He knows there is much work to be done.  Much which must go right, sunlight and rain, and much which must not happen at all, pests and blight, before he will be tasting the fruit of his labor.

Now here’s the hitch in this holy harangue; “22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, *PATIENCE*, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control”.  (Gal 5)  There are not many fruits of the Spirit.  This is not gifts where you get joy and I get self-con.. (yeah, I can’t even pretend I get self-control for the sake of illustration) and I get gentleness.  The fruit of the Spirit is not myriad.  It is one.  It is a multi-vitamin.  All of these attributes are in the one fruit God is growing in the floodplain of our souls.  Now, did one stand out to you?  Maybe as you read the list, one quality leapt off the page at you?  Perhaps the fourth one?

Patience, which we need to grow the fruit, is in the fruit we are trying to grow!  Ain’t that a kick in the caboose?  We have to grow the fruit we need to have in order to grow the fruit!  Chickens and Eggs! 

All that is to say this: when life gets you down, when God feels distant, when sin feels overwhelming, when your spiritual journey is waiting at the station or worse, you just looked up and realized you are on the wrong train going the wrong direction and have been for the last forty years, when all this talk of faith showing itself in obedience brings you guilt, when you cannot bear to watch the news or sitcoms or reality shows or even turn on your teevee because of how far from God we’ve become as a nation or a world, when you don’t feel like praying and then feel guilty for not feeling like praying, when a conversation ends and you know, you KNOW you should have included Jesus in it but didn’t, when the money runs out, when you doubt your calling or even if you were called in the first place, when the devil on your shoulder doesn’t seem to have an angelic counterpart on the opposite shoulder, when you’ve given in, given out and given up, when all seems lost, when night just won’t end; remember this…

In Genesis 3 God told Adam,

“cursed is the ground because of you;


    in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;


    and you shall eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your face


    you shall eat bread,


till you return to the ground,

         for out of it you were taken;”

This means all those things are to be expected.  Life is hard now.  Growing fruit is hard now for us…

But it’s just as cursed for GOD!  Did God curse the ground as a punishment?  Or was He just telling Adam what Adam’s sin had done?  For them both!  For now, God, who planted good crop in Adam and Even, had tares among His wheat.  The love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control He was growing would come with much more work now, at much greater cost to Himself!  It would cost His own Son!  For Jesus would be planted in the ground.  At the cross he would lovingly, joyfully, peacefully, patiently, kindly, goodly, faithfully, gently and in full control of himself and all the vengeful hosts of Heaven who wanted to rip us limb from limb, fall to the ground and die, be planted in the earth and three days later be taken out of it!  And from this one seed, a tree is growing, a vine is growing and spreading out branches to cover the whole Earth!  Nothing can stop Him!  Nothing can impede Him!  What He has begun, He will complete.  You are His!  He will bring you to fruition!

Just be patient.