Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life

by Beth Moore

Once you spend time digging around in your own little patch of dirt and tasting the fruit of your labors, it’s hard to eat a tomato the same way again. And since God is the ultimate Gardener, I have to believe He feels the same way.

He liked dirt, so He created it. It is a poor soul who confuses dirt with filth or soil with soiled.

When Jesus told His disciples, “My Father is the gardener” (John 15:1, NLT), He wasn’t using random imagery to sketch His point. Jesus’ Father had waited no longer than Genesis 2:8 to go on record that He is a home gardener. Goodness knows, He could have afforded to contract it out, but we get no glimpse of angelic landscapers.

In our corner of the world, where most flowerpots are screenshots, it’s grounding to remember that humankind’s first culture was horticulture.

God made to spring up. It’s a wonder that God would choose to slowly grow what He could have simply created grown. Why on earth would He go to the trouble to plant a garden forced to sprout rather than commanding it into existence, full bloom? Why leave His desk and get His pant legs soiled? Because God likes watching things grow.

Have you ever wondered why God goes to the trouble of sanctifying us? He could instantly zap us into His image the moment we decide to follow Jesus, or He could transport us into heaven the moment of our conversion. Why would He opt for taking us through the long, drawn-out process of planting, watering, pruning, and harvesting? But sure enough, He rolls up His sleeves, puts palms to the dirt, and begins putting the pieces of our lives together in a way that matters. I think it’s because He’s not looking for a store-bought tomato. He wants the real thing, raised by His own hands, hard won as it is. To a gardener, grown is overrated. It’s growing it that makes the fruit sweet.

Your fruit will outlast your life. You can’t always see the effects, because they are eternal, but one day you will. One day you will see that you couldn’t have been more significant if you’d tried.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, death, by God’s design, is part of the cycle that eventually brings new life. It’s the very decaying elements in the soil that make it rich and fertile for growth.

Fred Billings has

Good soil is a curious and compelling combination of life and death.

In essence, God’s reassurance to His people consisted of this message: on the other side of this catastrophe, you will once again find normalcy.

Take care not to judge from the look of things. I’m at work in ways you cannot see.

When we’re going through a difficult season, wouldn’t the best news of all be that life would simply go back to normal someday? When the framework of our daily existence gets completely dismantled and the landscape around us grows increasingly unrecognizable, our strongest longing is seldom prosperity. What we yearn for is normalcy. We don’t tend to ask for the moon when we’ve lost all we’ve known. We just want some semblance of our old lives back. The hard truth is, there’s no real going back. But once we get up again, there can be a going forward. In His faithfulness, God sees to it what we thought was the end isn’t the end after all. And eventually, perhaps not terribly long after, we realize we’ve transitioned into a new normal.