Ripe is Better

My daughter was married last January. She and her husband decided to plant a small garden around their house with tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, strawberries, cilantro, green peppers and onions. The thing about gardening is that it’s mostly about waiting. When you plant tomatoes, you don’t get to eat a tomato that night. It’s a process. You first have to prepare the soil, then you do the planting, and then you wait. Experience teaches you that the tomato is best when it is red and ripe.  You can harvest the tomato when it’s hard and green before it’s time and still use it. But that lack of patience causes you to not enjoy the tomato at its best. It’s kind of like God’s permissive will rather than His perfect will. 

Back in 2000, God told me, “This life is over.”   So to me, if this life was over, there was obviously another one to start. So I went about trying to harvest my tomato without waiting and on my timeline. As you can imagine, it didn’t turn out too well. And my tomato didn’t taste too great. But as I look back now, I realize that God was doing it the right way and in 2000 He was just preparing the ground. Then He planted a call in my heart and He waited. He waited until I was ripe and ready to step into my call. He could have taken me sooner and used me, but I really wouldn’t have been ready. He knew what everyone with a home garden knows. The best result comes from the waiting. So if you, like me, are impatient, just know that God’s time and space is different from ours and He knows the perfect time to pick His tomatoes. A big part of spiritual growth, I’m learning, is in the waiting.