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A surprise harvest and a reminder not to give up hope
by Aaron Myers
My wife is an avid gardener, but this year the garden slipped down the priority list. A trip abroad and a June wedding ate the time she would normally spend preparing beds. She did get a few tomatoes, some eggplant and cucumbers, and three teepees of our favorite heirloom pole beans into the ground. It was a meager garden, but it was planted.
Then nature didn’t cooperate. It was hot at the wrong times, and the rain came sporadically or not at all. We picked a few cucumbers and an eggplant or two, and I don’t think we harvested a single tomato. The beans were scraggly and gave only a few handfuls all summer. By mid-September, we’d written the garden off. There would always be next year.
In late October, well after the growing season should have ended, my wife went out for a run on a beautiful fall day. An hour and a half later she still wasn’t back. I figured she’d stopped to watch the sunset or the migrating birds.
When she finally came in, she simply said, “Look what God did!”
I turned and saw she had made a bucket of the front of her T-shirt, and it was full of green beans. Three weeks of September rain and a mild fall had produced one final bumper crop. I had just been thinking about pulling the plants and putting the beds to bed for winter. Neither of us expected a harvest.
Perhaps you’ve felt that loss of hope over a garden. Or over a family member who has wandered away, a neighborhood sliding toward blight and crime, or a people group that seems hardened to the gospel. Maybe you planted a seed so long ago that you can hardly remember what you said.
That late harvest was a reminder not to give up. In 1 Corinthians 3:6, Paul writes, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” The growth was never ours to produce. Our hope doesn’t rest in how well we present the gospel or how someone responds to it, but in God, and he isn’t bound to our timing.
In Luke 10:2, Jesus tells his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful...” He says it as a statement of fact. It was true then, and I believe it’s true now. So keep praying, keep trusting, and keep looking for ways to love well and share the stories of Jesus. Be faithful with what God has given you to do, which is planting seeds, and he will do the rest.
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