Heart and Soul Messages

My husband and I are not professional gardeners.  We manage, but our green thumbs are light green.  But what we are still learning in the practical is more than compensated by the love of gardening.

Going out at first light of the morning to see the growth that I just know has occurred overnight is one of my favorite things.  I love seeing those little sprouts, and the excitement and anticipation of knowing that one day my salad and my plate are going to be decorated with my home-grown vegetables makes my heart happy.

So when we saw that we could make a garden grow, we decided to take it to the next level and plant a fig tree.  We had the veggies, so now we were “branching out” to fruit.  And a fig tree seemed like a good beginner tree for us, so off we went to our local home improvement store garden center, adopted our fig tree, and came home and put our tree baby in the ground.  

We were so pleased to see the first little figs grow (the fact that we bought one with fig buds didn’t matter – we had figs).    We watered it and watched it for any new growth.  And then the first winter came.

We live in the south, and several days and nights of below freezing temperatures is not our normal.  So what did we do as fig tree parents?  We did our best to protect that little addition to our gardening family.  We covered it with blankets to keep it protected from the freezing temps at night and took the blankets off to let it get the sunshine for the few hours that were available.  Day and night we did that in hopes of helping that tree survive.

Then came Spring.  We watched and waited.  And waited.  And waited.  The leaves had fallen off back in the Fall, so we eagerly looked for new sprouts of leaves at the beginning of Spring.  Our neighbor has a very large, established fig tree, so we used it as a guide as to when those leaves should appear.

Weeks went by and nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  The neighbor’s tree bloomed and shot up with thick foliage, and our little tree was nothing but a stick with arms.  My husband was convinced that we had lost it in that freeze, and as much as I wanted to stay positive, I started to believe he had a valid argument.  But we both decided to just leave it and see what would come of it.

And then it happened.  No – no leaves came from that small trunk and branches, but what seemed like overnight, a shoot came up from the roots.  And another one shot up. And another.  Now, those shoots have grown thicker and taller than the original trunk, and that little fig tree has come into her own! Seeing that has been so very exciting, and we are so glad that we didn’t pull that little tree trunk up!

And that got me to thinking.  This little fig tree reveals a lesson.  How many times do we go through our days and commitments to reach our goals, to be better, to be stronger, but we don’t see any results?  It seems like we stay as a trunk with no leaves and no growth.

But you see, just as that fig tree, there WAS growth.  It was happening down at the root – a place that is unseen to us.  Life and growth and fullness were all happening at the root.  And at the right time, that growth not only broke through, but OVERTOOK the original trunk and flourished beyond what we were expecting to see!!

Jesus uses a fig tree in the Bible as a point of instruction for his disciples in order that they may have understood a concept they had questioned.  I find it very fitting that He used this fig tree to remind me and my husband that a lot is happening in what you don’t see.  Just because you are not seeing anything now doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.  What it means is that you are to continue being and becoming who God intends for you to be.  And while you are doing your part, have faith that God is doing miraculous things in what you don’t see.