In Other Words Tuesday for October 30, 2012

A Fallen Grape

                 

Quote: The harvest will not self-reap but the harvest will self-destruct if it’s not reaped.  Wayne Corderio

 

For the month of October we have gone from the beginning to the end of planting a crop that God would be proud of. Definitely a crop yielding the fruit the Lord wants us to yield in our Christian walk and talk. We prepared our soil, picked out our seeds, planted them, nourished and pampered our garden and now we get to “reap what we sowed.” Ouch! Do we really have to? Yes, we now come to the point where we finally reap what we’ve sown.

 

I remember when way back I finally woke up to that reality myself. It happened when the harvest of the crop I had planted fifteen years earlier was staring me in the face and I couldn’t believe what I had. The more I thought about it and back-tracked my steps over the years there was no denying it. What I had reaped was exactly what I had sown.

 

We can have our educated guesses on why our crops have failed here and there but when it comes to the actual growth of a crop there is no denying. Like it or not it comes out exactly what we sowed. Problem is at the time of our planting season we don’t think too much about precisely what it is this will yield that I’m doing today. Does the fourteen year-old child think that smoking a cigarette will get them the crop of lung cancer later? No. Is the person enjoying their donut breakfast for the fifth time this week think about the heart attack they will yield years from now due to being overweight? No.

We seem to fall into crop failure mode sometimes I’ll call it. As a young girl I heard the whole scoop about brushing my teeth but I never did it well. Now as an adult I would like to shake my finger at that young girl for the crop her behavior reaped that I now have to deal with. We just don’t get it. The one major “Murphy Law” you could call it that will never change is, “You reap what you sow” yet we refuse to believe it. We like the theory of, “It will never happen to me” or the one where we go to church on Sunday and pray for crop failure from our weeks’ worth of activity. It doesn’t work that way.

 Another thing about harvesting a crop is the fact that it doesn’t make sense to put all that time and effort into it only to miss handle it once it’s grown causing it to ruin. A crop may not be able to self-reap but it can very easily self-destruct if it’s not harvested properly. Like anything we grow it needs to be properly harvested or we could lose all we worked so hard to produce. When my dad raises his hay if he bales it up before its dry the bales will get moldy on the inside. What good does that do him? None!  What he has grown needs to be properly brought in and handled in order to benefit from the labor.

 Our Christian lives are no different. It doesn’t make sense to put all we have into growing the crop God can be proud of only to let it self-destruct out in the fields it was produced in. Our talent or gift for singing, writing, serving others, helping others, speaking, teaching, and so much more simply gone to waste because we don’t handle the harvest from them properly. Picking them and storing them frequently and correctly in order to enjoy the harvest from them.

 If you think about it when it comes to our Christian gifts or crops we aren’t the only ones that will benefit from them. For my dad the hay he grows is strictly for the cattle he raises and for no one else. However, with our spiritual crops they benefit not only us but those around us as well. In Leviticus 19:10 the Israelites were told not to glean their entire harvest because God wanted them to leave the fallen fruit for the poor or stranger who happens to come along.

Truly what a blessing it is to get even the benefit of a fallen grape here and there from someone who is producing as God would want them to. This should be a goal for our own garden to be that person for someone else. Someone producing well enough that even a fallen fruit here and there can be used to help others and glorify God’s kingdom.

It may be a part of our harvest we may never see but with God watching over us we can rest assure it won’t go by unnoticed. A crop self-reaped instead of self-destroyed as we spread to others the benefit of a fallen grape or fruit from the garden of our heart and the fruit basket of our soul.

 **Next week I won't get to participate in Tuesday's writing because I will be at a Cancer Treatment of America clinic having my cancer evaluated. See you the week after that!

© 2012 Karen J Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes Publishing         

 

 

Nourishment Weeding and Growing our Garden

Quote: We need to process our life to find the thorns. We have to give God permission to step in and step in hard to do what needs to be done to get rid of the thorns and prepare our field. The secret of growing fruit is the pruning, the cutting out what doesn’t need to be in order for the fruit to grow. We need to write things down we need to do and then check ourselves frequently. Wayne Corderio

 

So far we have cultivated our land and prepare our soil for planting. Next we went to the local store to purchase the seeds we wanted to plant. Now we are at the place where we have need to nurture what we have planted, weed out what we didn’t sow, and feed and care for the things we want to grow.

 

Delicate as our garden is we need to know too much water will kill our plants just like not enough will also. Plus we need to know how much is too much fertilizer and how much is too little. Being able to tell what your plants look like helps too when it comes to weeding out what doesn’t belong. Ignorance of what our harvest is supposed to look like is no excuse. It was the excuse my dad used once when he pulled a bunch of mom’s flowers from her flower beds claiming they were weeds. It didn’t get him off the hook with mom and it won’t us either when we stand before God.

 

It’s definitely not good enough to just plant the seeds and walk away from the garden only to come back with a plate and fork expecting to get instant, unlabored results.  What we plant has to be cared for no differently than the child we gave birth to or the animal we chose to be in our care. Whether we want to admit it or not there is not a great deal of things that don’t require some kind of labor.

 

Unlabored results in a garden are a weed infested patch of dirt. The same goes with our spiritual lives. If we want it to grow into something that produces good fruit for Jesus we need to be willing to put our “hand to the plow” or back to the shovel, our heart into our efforts whatever phrase you want to use and work! Work? “Mommy! Karen, used a dirty word in her writing! She said the ‘W’ word, work!” Yes, that’s what I said, “work.”

 

What we put into our spiritual garden is exactly what we are going to get out of it. If we allow the things in the world to grow in around us and choke out our relationship with Jesus that’s exactly what we will get. A relationship that has been destroyed by worldly forces we allowed to enter.

 

I wish I could say we could just put out a sign in front of our garden declaring it a weed free zone, no bugs, pest, unproductive plants not allowed. If it was that easy I would go into the business of selling such a sign. If you believe that I have ocean front property in Montana I’d like to sell you.

 

Truth is what we get out of anything depends a lot on what we put into it. If we want a good relationship with our spouse or children or co-workers we need to do our part. Weeding out what doesn’t belong is vital and again we need to know in our hearts what it is that doesn’t belong in our garden. Anger, fear, disobedience, impatience, and more are things that don’t belong in our spiritual garden. We need to recognize these things for what they are and know exactly what the damage is they can cause.

 

Tending to the garden takes patience, diligence and the desire to have a better outcome than the last crop we tried to grow. Becoming discouraged isn’t going to help our crop. Giving up won’t help the garden grow. We need to be forever watchful on the condition of our garden. Does it need more water, less fertilizer, what are its needs exactly to produce good fruit?

 

Our spiritual lives need that same kind of nurturing. A watchful eye and a caring heart with the desire to grow the kind of fruit our Heavenly Father would be proud. Someone who is after good results from intentional labor instead of crop failure due to unlabored efforts.

 

All of this doesn’t require a green thumb but an intentional heart and a willing spirit to labor for Jesus and to grow, grow, grow!

 

In Other Words Tuesday Picking and Planting

October 16, 2012

Our quote for this week's focus is from the Bible in Galatians 6:7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. In other words, in the end we may not like what we reaped but it’s what we sowed. We need to start out right, picking the correct seeds.

The first week of our “harvesting a crop God can be proud of” series we talked about preparing the soil for our planting. This week we get to talk about the picking and planting of the seeds. For some people the hardest part about the garden is the picking of the seeds. If you’ve ever planted some of the seeds believe me they can be pretty tiny and that creates a problem as well.

 

In the process of picking out seeds the first order of business is knowing what you want. If you want corn then what you pick out is corn seeds, sounds simple enough doesn’t it? No, not really it’s never that easy of course it deepens if you want yellow corn, or sweet corn, tall corn, or short. One by one you still have to weed out what it is you don’t want. You already know what you want to harvest but you have to get the right seed.

 

After getting the packages all lined out then comes the reading of the instructions on the when, where, and how to plant the seeds. Each item picked has to be planted at the right depth, in the right kind of light, with the necessary distance between seeds, and a few other tidbits to watch out for.

 

There is no doubt about it if we pick out the wrong seed we will get a wrong crop. Duh, Karen! Now, now don’t get too nasty too soon because if you think about it people are really stupid, dumb, nuts, crazy, or whatever you call it in this area. They plant a crop in their lives and when the harvest comes around they just can't believe what they got. As I've always said, "We may not like what we’ve sowed but it is what we planted." God said that in His scripture about how God is not mocked, you reap what you sow! Go figure.

 

Here is my confession I promised….I planted a garden once and after the months went by we were so excited to see what made it and what didn’t. One of the things that grew really good was the watermelon. It was the perfect size for eating when we decided to enjoy our harvest. As the grandkids and I gathered around in the kitchen to slice our newly grown treasure we got the surprise of our life. On the outside the watermelon was long, round, oval, green, and all the other features of a good watermelon. However, when we sliced it open it was orange. Orange? Yes, what we had grown was not a watermelon but a pumpkin that wasn’t totally ready for picking yet. We had totally forgotten that we didn’t plant the watermelon seeds that year because there was no room in garden for them.

 

We do this with our spiritual harvest as well. We think for sure we know what we planted but when it comes to harvest time we are surprised. We live our lives as we see fit and when we harvest a crop that isn’t that pleasant we wonder where we went wrong. The fault lies in the seeds we pick out to plant and grow. As Billy Graham once said, "We can’t sin all week and go to church on Sunday and pray for crop failure. Ignorance of what you have sown does not release you from what you reap."

 

The seed packages we need to be going after are the ones full of God’s word, faith, trust, obedience, self-denial, patience, love, and the list goes on. We can complain that our garden isn’t big enough for all that so we choose to leave out a crop or two but we are without excuse. The planting ground of our hearts God has given us is efficient enough to handle all we need to produce for Jesus.

 

A lot of the things we grow produce their own seeds and the cycle goes on, such as the seeds the words of our mouths produce. Some of the seeds turn out to be good and others are not so good. Once again it all depends on what we originally planted in our hearts as to what kind of word-seed gets planted.

 

As nice as it would be for Satan to stay out of our gardens he likes to come in uninvited to plant his own seeds. Seeds of doubt, discontent, disobedience, impatience, lack of faith, selfishness, and more. This brings up a whole new struggle in the garden and that is the weeding out of the things that grow uninvited or sadly enough, “invited.” God isn’t mocked, He’s not a fool, He knows we will reap what we sow. it’s important we know that as well.

 

We need to live intentional lives, intentionally picking out the fruit that God requires us to grow. We can’t live a wildflower seed life forever. A kind of life where you just randomly throw some seeds out on the ground and hope they grow or again, pray for crop failure on Sunday.

 

Truly, the best seed of all is the seeds of eternal life, the message of the gospel that contains eternal life. Spiritually we are where we are today because someone picked and planted a seed of eternal life in us or in our parents and ancestors who passed it down from generation to generation. We need to do this as well.

 

Pick and plant; plant and pick as you grow a crop today that will harvest tomorrow an awesome produce for the kingdom of God.

 

Forever fruitful. Forever God’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Other Words Tuesday ~~~ Prepared to Produce

My model in the picture is my dad in his good old irrigation boots and his trusty shovel.

Our quote this week is, "the condition of our soil makes a difference in the outcome of what we produce. We need to prepare well and then we will have abundant fruit. To prepare sometimes you have to plow the ground under and burn last year's stubbles left over. God will not sow seeds on a field that is not prepared. It's a waste of seed If we do our part God will do His part. Wayne Corderio

 For over fifty years I have watched my dad farm everything from grass hay, to wheat, alfalfa, and potatoes. In spite of the fact he worked hard on the fields the year before they still needed to be prepared each year in provision for the new crop. The last year’s crop had to be plowed under in order to prepare the soil for the new seeds. The fields were not only plowed under once but several times over and over again. After tearing them up they then needed to be smoothed out and corrugated in order for the water to flow thru evenly.

 

The thing that amazed me the most was the fact that no matter how many rocks we picked out of the field the year before each time dad plowed up the fields there were more rocks to pick. We use to think that was the number one crop grown in Powell Butte was rocks. Whether we felt like it was a lost cause or not it was something we had to do if we wanted a good crop. No doubt about it the better the preparation the more abundant the fruit or the crop that it would yield.

 

Our Christian lives are no different. The better the preparation of our souls the more abundant of a crop we will produce in our spiritual walk. Diligence and determination are the driving factors needed to start the process. Old habits, old crops, last year’s stubbles, bad attitudes, and wrong choices all have to be plowed under in order to prepare our souls for new crops yielding God’s will in our lives. Even the fields that grew good crops last year have to be plowed under and prepared all over again in order to yield an abundant harvest.

 

If we aren’t willing to prepare our souls for new growth, new seeds, or better crops then we better not expect God to sow seeds in our unprepared heart because He won’t. It’s a waste of seed, time, and effort. God is more than willing do His part but we have our part as well in the process and that’s getting ready for the new. We have to prepare the field of our heart to accept God’s word and be obedient, to believe in His promises, and trust in His power. However, what comes first is the plowing under of the old and making room for the new. It’s not a onetime course, a once in a life-time event, an evening course offered once a year. It’s something that is never ending.

 

The more diligent and determined we are the more likely we are to get the field of our hearts in the conditions they need in order to produce. It would be great if we were able to get rid of all the old stuff in a onetime plowing but each preparation brings up more stuff that needs to be dealt with. Indeed clogs and clogs of dirt and grime in our lives that will need to be smoothed out and corrugated. Fields that are corrugated well enough with evenly spaced out trenches that allow the living water of Jesus Christ to flow thru our fields freely and evenly.

 

All of it is a process that goes on unnoticed, behind the scenes, to yield a crop evident to all. Truly what we get out of our efforts all depends on what we are willing to put in to it. The corn in Safeway is not in its natural habitat, it was raised in fields prepared to produce. The faith you see in someone’s life didn’t just show up there, it was raised in a heart that was prepared to produce.

 

How prepared are you to produce? Have you disposed of the old first and plowed up the field of your heart getting ready for the new? Prepared to produce is a choice we all need to be willing to make, act upon, and work at. The choice is ours. It’s a choice we’ll never regret as the seed, time, and effort put into it are never wasted.

 

Prepared to produce, prepared to yield!

 

I’m the host this week and for the rest of the month of October as we continue on with this series on harvesting a crop God can be proud of. Now that we have the preparation of the ground taken care of the next step is the picking out and planting of the right seeds. The quote we will be using is Gal 6:7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. In other words, in the end we may not like what we reaped but it’s what we sowed. We need to start out right, picking the correct seeds.
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Others participating are:

Mamas Little treasures
Mr. Linky is giving me trouble again: Put your name and site in the comments and I will add it so people can get to your writing as well as we share in this month's harvest.

Fruit Bowl

The fruit of the Spirit is love.” (Galatians 5:22) Love is a fruit growing within us from a supernatural source. It’s not your love, yet it is, since the Spirit works in you both to will and to do loving things that are on his mind. You never hear of an apple tree struggling to produce its fruit. As long as sap flows within the tree, apples will form and blossom. And so it is with the Holy Spirit and love. He is our life and bears the fruit – not us. That’s why he was sent to live in us.” Spirit Rising: Tapping into the Power of the Holy Spirit
by Jim Cymbala




Fruit as we all know it is a by-product or produce from something else. Without the tree the apple wouldn’t grow. Without the vine the grapes wouldn’t cultivate either and the list goes on and on. The only fruit outside of the real thing that can be produced on its own is the bowl of fake fruit that sits on the kitchen table.

Speaking of fake fruit it wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out a trick my dad pulled on us kids when we were little. Raising five kids required a lot of fruit and he never seemed to get to it before we did, until! Until he learned the trick of hiding the real fruit of his choice in the fake fruit bowl that sat on the table. At our bedtime when he thought it was safe he would get out his fruit and eat it.


In this bowl of fruit all of them in the bowl are fake except the one real fruit hidden among it. Can you guess which it is? Too often we try to pull this trick with our spiritual fruit as well. We think we can hide the real stuff among that which is fake. We may be able to fool some of the people some of the time but we will never be able to fool God.


Forget the fake stuff, forget the fruit that doesn’t grow, nourish, or develop. What we need to be concentrating on is the fruit that is produced thru us by God. If you think about it we are the ones that should be the “fruit bowl” that which holds the fruit of the Spirit God grows in our lives if we allow Him to.


We can try and pack in our bowl or heart the things that are fake to make it look more full or colorful but in the long run it does us no good. We need to be looking for the “real stuff” that has greater nourishment value. The fruit from the Holy Spirit that is produced in us through the gardener of our lives, Jesus Christ.


In the picture also are two solar powered flowers. During the night they sit quietly on the table but when daylight comes and the sun hits on them directly through the window they can really get to dancing. They need to the sun to operate just like we need the Son of God to operate our fruit bowl as well. Without it we can try to dress up our lives to look pretty but the true value of a good bowl of fruit is that which is in it. Try putting a rotten apple or a banana that has gone brown in your bowl and see what you get.


The truth is God in us, working through us, makes one awesome “fruit bowl.” Thanks to the Lord He will produce fruit in us like love that will grow and grow and grow. It is fruit worth sharing, fruit worth eating from, fruit that will last forever. We don’t need a green thumb or our own bag of miracle gro to do it, only a heart willing to listen and obey in order to allow God to produce His blessings thru us.


Fruit anyone?!!! Yes, Lord, Yes!!!!

© 2012 Karen Gillett @ Pencil Marks and Recipes