“Poo-Berries” When I was a child, sanitation wasn’t really well explored as well as it is today. If you lived in the city you had the luxury of having access to the city sewer. If you lived in the country you had to install a septic tank and lateral lines. Well the rule for lateral lines was that you had to have 300 feet of lateral line. Many would use 3/100 foot lines. But there was this one house my father and I done some remodeling work on that was having trouble with its septic. Turned out the problem was that it had 1/300 foot line. Oh it was put in properly. But this year it was a very rainy spring and parts of the line had eroded. When we arrived at work we saw men trying to fix the problem. Out of curiosity I went done to see what they where doing to fix it. Upon arrival I noticed a pungent foul odor and every where was this black greasy like stuff. Not wanting to get any of the stuff on me I wondered around until I found a place to where I could get in closer. Turns out the only line coming from the septic tank had collapsed. The black stuff on the ground came out after they opened the line back up. Now why did I drag you through this ugly situation? Precisely to tell you this, when was leaving I noticed this giant tomato bush. It was dark green and just full of medium sized ripe tomatoes. I marveled at how this one bush was in the middle of a field with nothing planted around it. When I mentioned it to one of the workers and wondered how it got all this way. One of the workers called it a “system tomato”. Being even more confused I inquired as to why it was called that? He replied, it is a tomato plant whose seed started on a sandwich and went down and out through the system and ended up here. Well I looked at it and immediately I thought well that is a weed, something wasn’t right because it didn’t come up like all of the rest normally do. As I snarled my lips the guy told me that there was nothing wrong with it that all it was just a seed that took longer path to make a bush. He then proceeded to walk over and get a couple off of the bush and washed them and began to eat them. Right then I was like EWWW! Gross! He asked me how in the world I thought that we got the tomatoes in the store. I laughed and said “They don’t put fecal matter on them!” He laughed and told me to go up to the owners garden and see. So I walked up to the garden they had and looked for my self Sure enough around every plant there was a little of the stuff. In a bucket they had a whole bunch of cow manure with a tag on it that said fertilizer. Let me tell you this changed my mind about gardening the old school way. Well after a while of living in regret I found myself over my Grand mother’s house. There I asked her about it. I asked her what they used as fertilizer. She laughed and said “fertilizer.” When I asked was it always that way she grinned and said, “No when I was a young girl my mother used to use manure. On her strawberries” That is when my world fell apart. Because I remember her strawberries, and how they tasted so sweet, to know that they where “poo-berries” well that was the icing on the cake. Later I learned that it was fine, I learned the plant required the stuff we considered to be bad to feed on and make our food. I learned then that it was God’s way of replenishing the earth. Face it God made this world to produce. Everything in it has to go forth and be fruitful. Also everything in it creates it own form of waste in order to be fruitful. But it is the wildest thing to know that God created this earth that the elements in it require the waste and the fruit to survive. God created this world and when He did He balanced it. The people and animals of it need the plants for food and oxygen. While the plants need the carbon dioxide and waste to produce for man. But here is the problem. When man is standing in a dung field, he likes to look back at the fruit He bared in his past and revels in its glory. This for the most part makes him unproductive in his future production. Does a plant, bush, tree, or even a blade of grass look back at its former glory? Do they complain about the dung that has been placed in their lives? No, instead they are designed to deal with it. When we see that this is what God has created them to do then we know that their trouble is not really trouble but it is God’s way of sustaining them. For the tomato plant the soft fertile soil was the ideal place for it to drive its roots deep in the ground. See when you work according to God’s purpose, when you stop complaining about your environment, when you drive your roots deep in the ground while remaining in the light of the SON. You too will produce fruit. There can be no other way. God designed you and planted you on this earth, in your area, and even in the life you are living. One day sooner or later He will be expecting a harvest. So if you are not producing fruit then don’t look around and complain about all the dung, all the bad situations, all the narrow minded people. No look around and notice that the dung must serve its purpose. Sure you might be like the tomato plant in the field. You may not have come up in life in the “Normal” fashion. You might have had to travel in “the system” most of your life. But that doesn’t change who you are. A tomato seed is a tomato seed even if it is in a sewer and the potential god put in you was to be a tomato plant and nothing more. The way God set life up is for the things and people in it to receive a blessing in order to leave a blessing. Like the tomato plant in the field what many people see as a foil smelling situation could be a prosperous one for someone else. The fact is no matter what you produce in life somebody some where has to deal with what you have left them. Right now people are in two states of thinking. They are either stuck in the now, or they are stuck in the past. But here is an idea. Don’t worry about the past or the future, for one has already gone and we don’t have the promise of tomorrow. Instead try focusing on right now. Just like the plant it was only concerned with processing what God blessed it with. It wasn’t worried about the tomatoes that had already been picked. Nor was it concerned about making new tomatoes. No it was concerned with dealing with or processing the blessing. I didn’t know this until the Lord showed it to me but the tomato plant here possesses faith in what God had already established. The plant was concerned with doing what it was made to do. It didn’t worry about if it was producing enough. Its goal was to process what it could while it could. THE FRUIT CAME NATURALLY! This is a lesson we need to take to heart. We need not get so wound up in our failures. Life is hard for everyone. We need to be concerned with the time God has given us. We need to be concerned with not complaining so much about a dungy situation and just stop and ask God to show you the good in it or even better how you can turn it into good. That is the problem with many people today. They are so consumed by what they are doing that they get wrapped up in competing with the other plants in the garden. When in all reality all the plant should ever be worried about is making fruit. It doesn’t matter the size or shape of the fruit. But the fact that fruit was made. We place too much emphasis on the quantity of the fruit and lose focus on the quality. Did you know what happens when a piece of fruit like a tomato gets ripe? What that is, is the plant has put all it could into the fruit to the point it can’t hold any more. Then what happens is the stem dies and the fruit falls off. After this happens then another bloom begins to form. As God’s planted us we too need to do the same. When we do something for some one, or if we do things period, we need to put all we can into it. Many today just put enough into a job just to consider it finished. We place just enough in our work to please the boss or the customer and after that we are gone. Colossians 3:23&24 “Whatever you do, do your works heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.…” What would happen if we started putting a little extra into our work? As mentioned earlier many today we focus on the quantity, but when quality meets quantity then the flood gates will open up. The cool part is you don’t have to do much. Just strive for a little more each time. The point I making here is this, the bible tells us that all our righteousness is but a filthy rag in the eyes of God. But because of Jesus work on Calvary. Now when we get placed in the dung fields of life, God knows that we are able to handle it. Why because we are built to handle it by Him. He formed us with the physical and mental abilities to thrive in certain conditions. Not everybody is the same and everybody will not be able to do someone else’s job. I mean just because I know how to sew up a hole in a piece of cloths doesn’t make me a surgeon. But here is the thing, when God sees you are giving your best in everything you do. Then He’ll join with you and start to bless what you do. As with the tomato plant stuck out in the field, it had now support, it was placed in a messy area, but because it done what it was supposed to do by producing fruit. Then the Lord blessed that fruit with abundance. On a lighter note God will take your “Poo-Berries” and make them some of the sweetest best tasting berries around. Now I know that this piece was a little on the long side. If I could make it shorter I gladly would have. But the truth is the truth and some times it takes a minute for the truth to surface. My prayer and hope for the reader is that you always work in your purpose. You will find that the work might be a dung field at first, and the more you put into it the easier it will be to produce fruit. But don’t ever think about the quantity you produce. Because that is just a pit fall, more over set your mind on the quality of work you do. Remember it could take 10 years to build one good house and have it last a lifetime or you can hurry up and build one house that will not last ten years. But in what ever you chose to do put the best and most of “You” into it and God will be with you as you produce your fruit. May God bless you today in Jesus’ name I pray… Amen.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 22:41:45 +0000
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