Count Your Blessings #71 – Eating Something I Have Planted

We don’t have a vegetable patch in our garden, but we do have a number of pots which we use to grow various things that we like to eat. Taste is not the only criteria for growing things though, we only grow stuff which doesn’t require too much attention, we also like things that produce results quickly.

Over the last few days we have started to eat some of the things that we have grown.

On Sunday we had a first carrots, thinned out little ones which were really tasty. The carrots were followed by wonderfully tasty strawberries.

Last night we had lettuce and rocket, along with new potato seasoned with fresh mint.

These all tasted infinitely better than anything we have bought in a shop. Whether an independent taste test would confirm this; I don’t know. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, taste is definitely in the mouth of the grower. I grew them, and to me they taste fabulous.

We still have beans, peas, courgette, tomatoes and sweet corn to look forward too, as well as more lettuce, rocket, strawberries and carrots – delicious, perhaps not all in the same dish though.

I don’t really see myself as the grower though – I just planted them and gave them the occasional watering.

Jesus told a number of parables about crops and harvesting. It’s not surprising really, he was talking to a rural community. One of the famous ones is this one:

“What do you make of this? A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road, and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn’t put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled by the weeds. Some fell on good earth, and produced a harvest beyond his wildest dreams.”

Matthew 13

Another translation goes like this:

“A farmer went out to plant some seed. As he scattered it across his field, some seeds fell on a footpath, and the birds came and ate them. Other seeds fell on shallow soil with underlying rock. The plants sprang up quickly, but they soon wilted beneath the hot sun and died because the roots had no nourishment in the shallow soil. Other seeds fell among thorns that shot up and choked out the tender blades. But some seeds fell on fertile soil and produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted.”

Matthew 13

That’s an interesting story, but then Jesus goes on to say these words:

“Anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand!”

Understand what? Hear what? Why was he talking in parables anyway? These were exactly the stories the disciples asked. If you read the rest of the chapter Jesus goes on to explain why he uses parables and the meaning of this particular parable. I’m not going to go over His explanation other than to say:

“The seed cast on good earth is the person who hears and takes in the News, and then produces a harvest beyond his wildest dreams.”