God's "Organic" Harvest

I awakened this morning thinking about our garden. This year, our family planted our very first garden in a new plot of land that had never been gardened before. We decided we were going to go completely natural and organic and not add any chemical fertilizers to the soil. Now, being from the mountains, I know rich soil when I see it. When we plowed up the garden plot, I was a little disappointed because I could tell the soil was not the best. It was rocky and not very dark. We hadn’t had the time yet to make compost and add that to the soil to make it nice and rich so we decided to clear out the rocks and go ahead and plant; we refused to use chemicals or pesticides on our food even if the land wasn’t quite where it needed to be. The plot we had laid out for our garden was huge, so finding enough compost or buying enough natural compost for all that land was out of the question. I thought, “this garden is way too big for a ‘first-garden-ever,’” but we chose to “go big” or not at all. We were diving in – not just “playing in the water.” A friend wisely advised that our expectation shouldn’t be too high for the first year until we had time to really work up the soil and get it where it needed to be to have a great harvest. That was good advice.

So now, we are coming into harvest time and we are getting lots of nice things from our garden, though I admit they are not as pretty and lush as most other people’s produce, but I keep in my heart that we will keep working the ground – building up what we need to do to get that soil rich and full of goodness. I have faith still, that our garden will prosper in a completely natural way – the way God intended. We will keep working it. We will see a beautiful harvest.

As I ponder about the garden, I see how it is the same spiritually here in these mountains of Appalachia. We will see a beautiful harvest of the good things of God, of souls, of experiential times of His Glory, of lives being transformed and touched by His love. We will see it. It will be beautiful. We will not only see a little goodness here and there, but we will see a massive harvest of the beautiful things of God here in these mountains.

As in the natural, I think our challenge is with the soil, the land – the spiritual soil, the spiritual land, metaphorically speaking. Though our deep foundation is good, we are steeped in layers of rocky, dull soil – soil that is not very impressive, not very rich, not very life-giving. Speaking of our spiritual foundation here in the mountains, I believe that deep down there is a powerful solid rock, but in recent years many layers have been adding up here in the mountains – layers of denominationalism, layers of brow-beating, layers of gospel-killing man-made traditions, layers of indifference, layers of fancy-sounding theology and programs, layers of hype and flattery, layers of complacency, layers of depression, and doubt, and poverty-mentality. All these layers are man’s junk – the stuff we add to the truth of God’s beauty and call it “church” – call it “religion.” It’s time we think differently. It’s time we have our minds renewed and come back to the way God intended things to be.

For many years now, even the country farmers here in the mountains, whose parents and grandparents did everything naturally concerning their gardens, have bought into the lie that chemical and man-made supplements are the way to go for raising a garden, though these procedures actually harm the soil and cause them to be dependent on feeding that process – thus making the farmers dependent on, not the land, but on the industry that sells them the products. It makes them dependent on the world rather than on God’s blessings. It’s a way for the farmers to control the outcome rather than allowing God’s natural way to just “be.” Though they may have quick lush produce, they also have food that is full of unnatural ingredients. They have a counterfeit.

How many of our churches in the mountains have bought into the lie that we can add in all the man-made stuff, get a good big crowd and a good big proud-looking image, and a good amount of money as well, and still think that we have a good harvest, even though what we really have is a counterfeit – something that looks good on the outside but in the depths of it, there is not much real life there. The real harvest of God, the beautiful harvest of God is truly life-giving. It looks beautiful even when it’s humble and small. It is real. It is authentic, even to the depths.

This is what I know we will see.