May 23, 2008
*Note: Several folks have asked if this column has “spun off” a Bible study by a similar name in the community. If anyone else has wondered the same thing, the answer is simply that it hasn’t.
Ah, springtime! Warmer air, wetter lawns, and longer days! It’s time to get out and do all the things we didn’t have to worry about while the world lay dormant in a wintry snooze. Putting mileage on your lawnmower may or may not have ranked highly in your favorite things to do list, but one can’t have the perks of spring without the duties of spring as well.
To illustrate that perspective, my family and I try to do a little bit of vegetable gardening when we can. Even though my “green thumb” is really more of a “burnt sienna”, we generally plant tomato vines, cucumbers, crook-necked squash, beans, and bell peppers. When we’ve felt especially ambitious and can find time to do it, we have on a couple of occasions planted some corn as well. My wife, Diane, has been a major fan of Silver Queen for a very long time.
Planting a garden for us though usually has been a mixture of exciting adventures. A few years ago, for example, I happily discovered two important qualities within myself: both my magnetism for mechanical mishaps and my uncanny resemblance to Elmer Fudd in his carrot patch.
Having borrowed a tiller from my gracious mother-in-law, I quickly set out to put it to use on a very rare occasion in which the weather was cooperating with my schedule. I had gassed up the tiller, started its engine, tilled up three and half feet, but then the motor stopped running. I tried to restart it, pulling on its string over and over again until my arm felt like it might at any moment fall off, but it was no use. I couldn’t get it started again and could see no obvious reason why it wouldn’t. Frustrated, I wheeled it to the garage, wondering if there might be a loose fuel line (as if I really knew how to fix one). As I stood over it, I suddenly heard a gurgling sound and a patch of oil began to spread out under the tiller. I stared forlornly at it realizing that I wouldn’t be able to use the tiller that afternoon… the one afternoon I would have free in days (and who knows what the weather would be like the next time I’d have one).
I grabbed a shovel and marched back to the garden spot. I spent the rest of the day digging up the hard ground, trying to chop up red clay that needed more Miracle Gro than we could afford. After spading a stretch of ground about thirty feet long and four feet wide, my wife, Diane, and I, joined by our children, began to plant tomato plants, peppers, beans, and corn. Just when it was getting too dark to see any longer, we patted down the soil over the last of our corn kernels. Diane and the kids returned to the inside of the house to clean up while I watered everything down. What a proud bunch we were that evening when we drifted off to sleep!
Over the following week we weeded, watered, and watched our little garden. One evening after a very busy day, I went out into the back yard to inspect our plants. Noticing that the tops of four of our eight tomato plants looked as if they had been snipped off, I groaned and turned to go inside the house, catching sight of a pair of large rabbits before they disappeared under a hole in our tall, wooden fence. Ah, ha! So that was it! I went inside, shared with my family that Peter Rabbit and Company had moved into town and were enjoying the fruits of our labor even before there were any fruits in the garden! We rummaged around and found some bright and shiny pinwheels whose movement we thought would likely scare rabbits away.
The next morning I went out to place the pinwheels in the garden and found that another pair of tomato plants had been snipped off. I shook my head in disgust while a gaggle of blackbirds jeered at me from the branches of the tall oak tree nearby. “Those wascally wabbits!” I thought to myself. “Well, at least we’ll still have the beans, corn, squash, and cucumbers.”
As it turned out, the beans did all right and we did get some cucumbers. A couple of squash plants were also snipped, but we still got some handsome crook-necks out of the survivors. But the corn that we had planted never showed. As I stood considering it one day, well after the corn seedlings should have germinated and poked their heads above the ground, I suddenly remembered the huge crowd of blackbirds that had been vacationing in our neighborhood only a few weeks before. It dawned on me that rabbits weren’t the only visitors that seemed to have been frequenting the Mollohan Garden Café!
I learned then the big difference between green thumbs and green horns – the former enjoy a harvest from their labors and others enjoy the harvest of the latter. So we planted some more corn and put up some more pinwheels. With that batch we succeeded.
This year, while my green thumb is still not very green, my deficiencies are more than compensated by my wife’s competencies. We’ve planted our garden (only this time in three separate box gardens, complete with covers made with poultry netting). We also laid out a couple of rows of cantaloupes outside the boxes which, we fear, are still a bit vulnerable to garden thugs (I haven’t had a chance to make a cover or anything to frighten rabbits or birds yet). Diane was savagely hoeing some clumps of dirt and abruptly paused. “You know,” she remarked, “if we don’t get something out here pretty quick we’re just getting this ready for all the bunny buzzards in the neighborhood!” I smiled weakly and promised that we’d get something out there right away. Then I grinned and said, “Thanks! That’s something that needs to be shared!”
See, I couldn’t help but think of Jesus’ story about a farmer who went out to sow seed in Matthew chapter 13. The man throws his seed about on the ground. Some lands along the path where birds come and eat it up. Some is tossed upon rocky ground where it springs up but then withers when the heat of the day bakes the exposed roots. And some is lost among thorns where the seeds do in fact begin to grow, but the thorny plants about them compete with the good plants and choke them so that they’re utterly fruitless. Finally, there is seed planted in good soil where they spring up, thrive, and eventually yield an incredible harvest.
When asked by His disciples to explain why He had told the story and what it all meant, He basically taught them that the heart of a man or woman is like the ground onto which is sown the seed of His Word (the message of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord). Some folks hear it but others not wishing them to receive such hope act like the blackbirds which gobbled up our corn kernels and “take the Word away.” They distract hearers with false hopes and smokescreen objections. Then there are some who hear the Word and like the idea of receiving God’s gift of grace. But then they abandon the call at the first sign of any real requirement to genuinely follow Jesus, disdaining the necessary commitment to persevere. They resent the call of personally sacrificing one’s own position of comfort, plans for the future, or pride in one’s own abilities and accomplishments. Because their roots just don’t go down deep enough, their “Christianity” never amounts to anything. And there are some who are so busy, worried, or preoccupied, that the spiritual fruit in their lives that could have been is never made a reality.
But then some seed falls onto good soil. The “bunny buzzards” and “birdy bandits” just can’t get the best of the heavenly farmer, the Spirit of God. Unlike me, He knows good soil and He knows how to take care of it. If He’s sowing seed in your life right now, pray for His help in allowing that seed to take root, be weeded of spiritual weeds, protected from predators, and carefully sheltered by His love from scorching heats of discouragement and sorrow. Allow Him to cultivate in your life the fruits of His love, joy, peace, hope, and faith that will in turn yield a bumper crop for God for all eternity.
(Thom Mollohan and his family have ministered in southern Ohio the past twelve and half years and is the author of The Fairy Tale Parables: Classic Fairy Tales Pointing to God's Love and Truth. He is the pastor of Pathway Community Church and may be reached for comments or questions by email at pastorthom@pathwaygallipolis.com).
