by Rev. Melinda Giese
In 2018, my parents and I attended the Seattle Flower & Garden Show. I fell in love with a display of beautiful lemon plants and believed the seller’s claims that lemon plants can grow outside in our climate and no, it wasn’t that difficult to take care of them. As a novice gardener, you can guess where this story is going!
When we brought our lemon plant home, we put it outside on our deck. The temperature turned out to be too cold, and our lemon plant promptly lost all its leaves. We brought it inside and cut it back. It grew new leaves and produced fragrant blossoms in our laundry room. Then the blossoms fell off, and it lost all its leaves for the second time. This time, we decided it wasn’t draining properly. We cut it back yet again. It regrew leaves and this spring, we moved it to our deck where it once again produced blossoms. Despite the current issue of black spots on the leaves …finally….this summer, our lemon plant has indeed produced baby lemons! They are green and only an inch in size, but they exist!
When I saw that the lemon plant we’d had for three and a half years had finally managed to produce tiny lemons, it felt like a small miracle. At several points in its life, I had suggested to my family that we could toss that plant into the yard waste and be done with it. High maintenance plants that drop all their leaves in the laundry room do not give me joy! But others were more persistent and said, just give it more time, don’t give up yet.
In Joyce Rupp’s book, Fragments of Your Ancient Name, one of her names for God is “Extravagant Persistence.” She writes this prayer to accompany the name:
You pester me to keep on growing
And, remarkably, persist in believing
In my inherent ability to be more.
At the same time, you continue
To love me, pretenses, warts, and all.
These continual nudges and urgings
Of yours furnish me with assurance
That you’ll assist me in my changing.
Thank you Extravagant Persistence,
For never, ever, giving up on me.
I love this reminder that God is such a better gardener than I. When we talk about bearing fruit in our lives, we often think of the daily acts of kindness or service that we engage in. But sometimes, there are larger areas of growth that take time to show results. It can take us years to discover the gifts God has given us and how best to use them. Finding closure or healing in situations that have caused us pain also happens very slowly. Some of the fruit we bear in our lives takes a great amount of time as well as the work of an Extravagantly Persistent gardener.
May we give thanks today for a God who never gives up on us, who believes in our capacity to change and grow, and nudges us into that growth throughout our entire lives. And may we rejoice that sometimes even the most unlikely areas may one day, produce fruit.