Bearing Good Fruit: Morning Watch Mondays

The F.A.R.M. at Falling Creek is an amazing place, and as you can see in the pictures we are well on our way in preparing it for this growing season! We can’t wait for our campers to get here to help us grow the crops and take care of the animals!

My grandparents (Nana and Papa) knew how to grow a garden well. Growing up I would love to slowly crawl through the rows of fruits and vegetables like I was on an Easter egg hunt, carefully checking under each oversized prickly leaf for cucumbers or squash to appear. I would stroll down the rows of corn hoping there would be an ear or two ready to be picked, or study the grape vines winding between fence posts wondering how they found their way.

When I wanted to start my own garden I called Papa to ask him what I should do, expecting it to be a fairly quick process where you drop some seeds into the ground, and voila…veggies! I was way off. He talked to me about turning the soil months beforehand so that the nutrients in the soil could be activated, and how to mix fertilizers that would benefit growth even before you planted a thing. He talked to me about checking the pH levels in the soil to make sure it had the correct amounts of acid that would promote growth. He talked to me about which seeds needed to be planted in mounded soil, and which ones needed level soil. WAIT A SECOND, I wasn’t planning on doing all of this work before I even planted a seed! This farming thing was going to be a lot harder than I thought!

Papa taught me that in order to grow healthy crops you must pay careful attention to the condition of the soil underground. Good soil is essential to grow good crops.

Did you know that our lives work the exact same way? If we want our lives to produce good “crops” such as love, joy, peace, etc…, we must pay careful attention to what is feeding the roots of our hearts.

In Luke 6:43-45, Jesus was talking with his friends about this very thing. They were asking him questions about the right way to live life to please God, and he talked to them about their hearts. He said, “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”