“Treat a man as
he appears to be and you make him worse.
But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and
you make him what he should be.”
When he was yet in my womb, I prayed for it. Tenacity.
Strength of conviction that would enable him to say it is so when those
around him would say it is not. Holy
stubbornness that refuses to surrender hope to hopelessness. And tenacious he is!
This summer, one of the most blisteringly hot I can
recall in my thirty-seven years, my tenacious ten-year-old decided to tend a
garden. He was pretty well on his own on
this venture, for unfortunately, his mother has little to no gardening
savvy. Yet he was not dissuaded. He read books, and he talked with his
grandmother (who has an exceptionally green thumb), and he tilled and planted
with gusto. I had never seen the child
quite so diligent. Morning and evening
he would water his two little pepper plants and his three little tomato plants,
and every day they would be inspected carefully and thoroughly. But the summer heat was crushing. Despite his diligent and faithful care, his
plants began to wither and show signs of distress. Trying to protect his heart from feelings of
failure and discouragement, I talked to him about articles I’d read concerning
the heat and drought and how many far more seasoned gardeners than he were
losing crops this year. To be quite
honest, I wanted him to give up. It was
almost painful for me to watch him care for something that I knew would
inevitably yield no fruit. But there was
that tenacity I prayed for! And so he
continued his ritual of care and tending.
Yesterday morning, nearly five months after planting
his garden, my Grant came to me with a grin on his face and a peck of peppers in
hand that he had picked from his little plants.
Astounding! To top that off, he
was delighted to inform me of a small, green tomato spotted on one of his
tomato plants, as well as blooms galore on the others.
Perhaps you’ve never stopped to consider how you might
identify with a pepper plant, but I began to do so as I sat marveling over my
son’s October harvest. Sometimes, for
one reason or another- some of those reasons being choices we make, and some of
them being things which are completely out of our control- we seem to suffer
from failure to thrive. We don’t seem to
be growing where we’re planted. From the
outside, we may appear to be withered and dead- not even worth the time and
effort to tend. Maybe we’ve even been
abandoned by those who have deemed us a lost cause. Yet God sees what no one else sees- that the
fruit within us is not dead, but dormant.
And as only a master gardener can, he cares and tends and heals and
restores, and those tender sprouts regain vitality, and that fruit comes
forth. Perhaps not on anyone else’s
timetable, not meeting the “should” standards imposed by the proverbial
“they.” I’ve found that God really
doesn’t get hung up on such things. He
has an affinity for the weary, beaten down, and written off. He looks beyond appearance and calls forth
that which is!
