Reap What You Sow

You reap what you sow. Who can argue with that? One red pepper and two feeble tomatoes is what I have sown from my community garden plot. I have gone to water the plot three times...hmmmm...and produced three fruit. Not much effort, not much harvest.


However, my black-eyed susan's, porch peppers, basil and petunia's are doing well, don't you think?

I step out my front door and water my plants and they respond by growing well.

The problem, as I see it, is that we sow well when the sowing is convenient or "fun". Raising babies was fun, ... teenagers... not so much. But, I must "tend" to raising them as I would anything else that I want to reap a harvest from. I did not expect to reap a huge harvest of tomatoes from two feeble plants that I only watered three times. (I'm sure my kids would be thrilled to know I am comparing them to tomatoes, but that's how my brain works.) Tending to teenagers is a full-time job. Just feeding them dinner is a challenge. The story of Jesus feeding 5,000+ is only amazing to me because Jesus still had energy to feed the souls of His people after feeding their stomachs. After food shopping, cooking and cleaning, I don't have much energy left. I have a friend who is very sick, so her teenage daughter moved in with us. That makes 3 teenagers and 3 adults to feed and tend to. Every night of the week someone invites someone for dinner. Two nights last week we had 9 for dinner and one night we had 30 (the baseball team). I'm not complaining, in fact, I love having people here. That's the part of sowing I don't mind. It's the deeper stuff that gets me tangled up, the feeding of souls. I want to produce a garden with a huge harvest. Pray for me, that the raising of those in my home will be more "fun" and thus easier to tend to. I wish my kids were like my basil, when I want it to continue to grow and produce a bigger harvest, I just pinch off their heads...