Meditation for a Monday

The seeds for my garden came in the mail last week. Some months from today, due to a combination of water, photosynthesis, soil nutrients, and hope, they will become cucumbers, tomatoes, beets, lettuce, and peppers. Even for the most accomplished gardener (people other than me) the journey from seed to fruit is a mysterious one.

We live in a time, surrounded by a civic religion where there is supposedly no mystery to productivity. Books jammed with self-help clarity promise that if you do these 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 things right, your best life will emerge. Girl, just wash your face. And maybe all that productivity fruit is easier for some. I’ve never found it to be so.

But on this first Monday of Lent, I am reminded of the fruit we are hoping toward:

Care of our Inner Life. Gentleness. Trust in God. Goodness. Kindness. The Ability to Suffer Well. Compassionate Community. Joy. And above all else, Sacrificial Love.

The self-help books for these fruits no one can fathom. A gentle reminder this morning, friends, as the sun starts to rise here in fly-over country, that the productivity we are offered and that we strive for on most Mondays is not the produce that grows from the Spirit. The fruits of our civic religion are appreciation, happiness, self-fulfillment, results, tolerance, reputation, legacy, and discipline. Manufactured substitutes, but simply not the same as the Spirit's harvest.

The hardest thing I’ve had to learn about God’s penetrative work of the heart is that what God offers is not the opposite of what I’ve been striving at, but just beyond it. A farther, deeper, and richer journey, but one that requires completely different roads. And starts with different seeds.

Appreciation is not love.

Happiness is not joy.

Self-fulfillment is not peace.

Results are not patience.

Tolerance is not kindness.

Reputation is not goodness.

Legacy is not faithfulness.

Discipline is not self-mastery.

The Spirit seeds take us the way of Jesus. The long road from God and back to God. It begins where seeds of long-gestating fruit are planted in willing soil.

Lent is the Old English word for Spring. It is a time for planting seeds, though the fruit may be long in coming. As you stand over the threshold over your door, or at your computer, or waiting in the school drop-off line, I hope you will pray with me:

"Jesus plant in me a seed. Cultivate in me good soil."

“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.” - Mark 4:27-29