Just like those failed broccoli plants, if we try to get a dream or Blessing before God says it’s ready, it doesn’t come out right. It pops up fragile, undeveloped, less fruitful, and ultimately unusable.
Hello Readers, hope all’s well. Time for another post in my new series, Natural Wisdom. This is a series where I write about some of the lessons God has taught me, through nature. God teaches us so much through nature if we’re willing to watch and listen to see and hear the Wisdom.
And one of the best ways to gain Wisdom is actually to make mistakes!! There are a lot of diverse mistakes I can make while working on my land and trying to produce food. I wrote a bit about this two posts ago. But before the large-scale project I’m working on now, which inspired this series Natural Wisdom, I made many smaller attempts in the past few years. We can call those attempts ‘gardening’ rather than ‘farming.’
Actually I’ve written quite a few posts about gardening since the beginning of this blog. Seeds of Wisdom is the oldest one of those posts. Another post, this one from 2021, is Planted, not Buried. Check those out if you like.
Anyway, none of these older attempts were successful. But failure can teach us a lot, if we’re willing to Humble ourselves by that failure and do better next time. In my case, I see a lesson from God in my past gardening failures. A lesson I keep needing to learn over and over again, so God keeps reminding me over and over again.
It’s a painful lesson we all need to learn: Wait on the LORD. When we get away from God’s timetable and try to have things our way, we only screw ourselves up in the process. What we get by rushing is nothing good, and nothing like what we could have had if we had waited.
Keep that in mind as I tell you of some crops that did not bear fruit in my field.
Skipping the Growth We Need
One of my earliest attempts at growing food was planting vegetables found in the typical Western diet. Tomatoes and broccoli, to be specific. None of these early attempts succeeded, but today I’m going to focus on the broccoli. And don’t worry, there is a Spiritual point to what I have to say about failing to grow broccoli. This is a Christian blog at the end of the day, not a gardening/farming blog.
I was excited to grow broccoli, and I wanted it to work. It’s a major vegetable in my diet. It’s good for men, it’s good for women … it’s good for the human race!! That’s why I wanted to grow it at my house.
But the problem for me with growing broccoli is the climate I live in. I live in the Caribbean, and it’s so hot year-round here that the broccoli can’t grow correctly. The broccoli tries to mature too fast, because the heat makes it do that. I suppose the heat fools the plant into thinking it’s close to harvest time. You can see how that creates a problem when we have summer weather all-year round. The broccoli starts growing heads (the part that we eat) too early in its life cycle, before it’s ready to do so. Before it’s the right time. And the plant and its harvest suffer for this.
Since these broccoli heads come before they’re ready, they don’t come correct. The heads are too small, actually they’re tiny. So tiny that they aren’t worth eating. But more importantly the individual heads don’t fully develop, so they’re not ready to eat anyway. The final result is a misshapen, ugly broccoli with a deformed stalk dotted with ‘mini’ heads that don’t (and can’t) provide the full harvest of nutritious healthy food that a broccoli plant should give.
Well, by this point you’re probably thinking ‘alright, so what?? Is there a point to this??’ Yes, there is—let me tell you what God has taught me through my failures in broccoli farming.
Give it Time, or Get it Wrong
To get off topic for a second, one thing God taught through this is that I must plant the right crops for the climate I live in. That means planting the local vegetables that thrive in the heat we enjoy here. To take that idea and put it in a non-agricultural context, it means we all need to pursue the “right” dreams, blessings, and Godly missions suitable for our lives, talents, gifts, and abilities.
In the same way the Caribbean is not the right place for growing broccoli (not without costly temperature control), our God-given gifts may be unsuitable for certain dreams of ours that we desire but are not actually God’s plan for us. For example, although it’s not something I desire so much, I know my life and talents are unsuitable for pursuing an Evangelism mission of being an Evangelist on TV. I wasn’t Blessed with the talents for being a TV host, but that’s OK, because I have been Blessed with other talents suited for other missions. Do you see what I mean??
But this is a story for another day. The main point I have in mind today is about waiting on God’s correct timing. So let me get back to the point.
In my Soul, I feel the most important thing God has taught me through the failed broccoli is that it’s a counterintuitive, self-harmful mistake to try and “harvest” anything in our life before it’s ready. To go off-script from God’s Plan and try to get that blessing/ministry/job/dream on our own, before God says it’s time.
It’s not fun being in God’s waiting room. It’s painful to wait for God to deliver these big life Blessings, very painful. I’m still waiting for some of these long-term wait Blessings and big Promises to be delivered. But I know they will one day. Then I can speak on this topic with more authority. It’s painful to wait, but it’s worth it.
Until then, I try to remember the failed broccoli I planted in a few attempts over the last two years. They were failed, unusable crops I was forced to dispose of since they were good for nothing. They did not nourish, they didn’t provide me with energy, they didn’t give anything back for what I put in. And it’s all because they tried to be fruitful before they were ready. Before God said it was time. And yes it’s also because, as I explained above, this is the wrong climate for broccoli. But that’s besides the point.
Just like those failed broccoli plants, if we try to get a dream or Blessing before God says it’s ready, it doesn’t come out right. It pops up fragile, undeveloped, less fruitful, and ultimately unusable.
As it is with vegetables that flower/head before it’s time, so it is with the dreams/Blessings/ministry/missions (etc.) we’re waiting on God for. Waiting on the LORD is one of the hardest things we’re called to do in life. But it’s one of the most worthwhile things too. And delayed gratification leads to more happiness in the end, in the long-term.
Or so I hear. I have to be honest and say I’m still waiting on these things as I’m sure many of you are. But I’ll keep waiting, knowing it doesn’t do me any good and only hurts me to rush it. And one day soon I hope and pray I can tell you the happy story of how God brought my life crops to full fruition.
Full fruition. That only comes from waiting on the LORD. If we don’t wait on the LORD, we won’t want or like what we get.
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