Home grown!!

The other day my wife fed me some dandy blueberry pancakes. We also enjoyed some homemade raspberry ice cream, which was ridiculously good. There’s something about having grown your own fruit and veggies to eat, I’m told, and that they taste better than what you get from the store.

However, that really depends on what store you get them from and what price you pay. For instance, in the middle of the winter last year I saw raspberries that came from South America at Sams. They were flawless, every last one of them, and just bursting with flavor. Apparently they’d picked the best of the best and packaged them up for sale, and it showed. They were all uniform in size, color, taste, and texture – in other words perfect. The price was steep but well worth it.

But we like growing our own. We take special pride in it, don’t we gardeners? Oh, the blueberries I ate in my pancakes, some were some small, some large. Some were bluer than others. The raspberries in my ice cream also varied in size, and there were some little brown spots that I “overlooked”. Some were a little limper than others, a bit old, yet some were more crisp, a bit ripe. When folks grow their own corn, they also have uneven rows, unlike store bought which usually is perfect kernels in perfect rows all the way to the end of the cob. My peaches, while delicious, have little bruises and imperfections, sometimes spotty color instead of a smooth perfect “blush”. But we don’t care, because we tell ourselves they are the freshest and that they are ours, and we are a bit biased. In fact, we are VERY biased!

Yet, which one wins at the county fair? Take peaches, blueberries, anything. Those judges look for size, color, taste, texture, quantity – all the same things we are willing to “overlook” when we eat them ourselves. The one that wins is the one that is the most perfect – which is exactly what the grocery store tries to buy to sell to you. People don’t like surprises, they want blueberries that taste like blueberries, that look like blueberries, that have the right size, etc. They want perfection. How do you get perfection? By starting with good seed and consistent, happy soil/sun/temperatures.

God likes his perfect fruits, too. Oh, certainly those fruits come from us and grow in our hearts. How do we grow the prize winners? By starting with good seed, the word, and living lives that include both sunshine and rain. By being “temperate”. If we do these things, the fruits will come. Paul planted, Apollos watered, God gave the increase.

But the thing is we need to watch out for some home grown ideas. When we start to grow fruits that are imperfect, once we recognize them we need to cull them out so the perfect can grow, with ALL the resources available. It would be silly to waste water, fertilizer, and time on food things that are unfit to eat, just as it would be silly to waste time, study, and effort on sinful things that are in actuality fruits of disobedience. The problem that may come in is that we are prideful. When we start having our own home grown ideas, we turn a blind eye to the imperfections. We no longer worry about the way it looks – our influence on others. We ignore the way it tastes – the way we leave others feeling. We overlook the size of it – whether or not it measures up to God’s standards. A little rot is something we decide we can live with – a stink in the ointment of our service. The nutritional value is not there, but we don’t care. Since we grew it ourselves – we came up with wild ideas that we can’t support with scripture but are based solely on opinion – we are biased in a prideful way and scoff at those who are united in harmony, truth, and the perfection obtained by obeying God’s word as faithful servants. Friends, those in such a relationship were bought with a steep price, yet GOD says they are worth it.

As for quantity, if I suddenly had some strange idea that came about based on opinion rather than scripture, if someone came to me with new ideas that caused trouble or dissention, I would question where it came from. The price is not worth it. Why is it strange, new, different than what I’ve ever heard before from anyone else? Do I think it was a new revelation from God? It would seem more likely someone tossed in some bad seed from the other side of the fence. After all, when it comes to home grown, who’s home is this world, anyway? Think about it!

Randy