bestow Your blessing on our lives; here let Your love
find root.
Bring forth in us the Spirit’s gifts of patience, joy,
and peace;
deliver us from numbing fear, and grant our faith
increase.
---Carl P. Daw, 1990
The more we learn about gestation and human growth, and
germination and plant growth, the more similarities become apparent. So much of
early growth happens silent, hidden—good, strong changes taking time and
nourishment before new life is ever ready to make an appearance on the scene.
And while I’ve never been a farmer, having to depend on invisible growth for
the future, I have been a mom, waiting helpless for months on growth beyond my
control for my arms to be full. And I know the numbing fear that comes with
trusting unseen growth, especially what must be the farmer’s fear after a
drought year. I know the mother’s waiting fear after still birth. The breath-held,
afraid-to-hope, needing-to-trust, wanting-to-believe fear that growth is happening.
I think other parts of our lives are like that, too. So many
characteristics of a faithful life grow unseen, tucked away, nurtured by time
and steady attention. The Spirit’s gifts grow in us, perhaps unseen as they
germinate, but growing all the same, ready to yield mature aspects of our
character that will shape the world around us. Peace, love, joy—powerful forces for transforming life. And the patience to believe that unseen growth will yield a harvest.
May God deliver us from the chokehold of fear into the
embrace of faith…while we wait.
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