Volunteer Squash and the Kingdom of God

There is a volunteer squash in our garden. We didn’t plant it but it’s there. A few years ago we had volunteer cantaloupe – it was the best cantaloupe we’ve ever grown, in fact, it was the only cantaloupe we’ve successfully grown to date, though we’re trying again this year.

                                                                 

When I first saw the squash (actually Vickie pointed it out to me) had I not known it was a squash I might have pulled it as a weed – after all, we didn’t plant it.

There’s a place in the Gospels where the disciples tell Jesus that they saw someone doing works in His name and they told him to stop because he wasn’t one of them – Jesus told them that they’d made a mistake – just because the man wasn’t part of their group didn’t mean he wasn’t serving Jesus.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that one person plants, another waters, but that it’s God who gives the increase. I don’t think Paul was much of a gardener or he would have talked about weeding too. Sometimes we plant the seed and work with it through maturity and harvest; sometimes we inherit plants that are there because others sowed seed; sometimes we come upon plants that just need some water – some love and some care and maybe even a little weeding and pruning.

If we don’t know what good plants look like we just may pull up some plants that God has had someone else plant. If we are so focused on tomatoes we may miss a squash or even a luscious cantaloupe. We may think, “That plant can’t be any good because I didn’t plant it. That can’t be a good plant because it isn’t a tomato.”

I’ve seen church folks do that with denominational traditions or specific doctrines that have little if anything to do with Jesus Christ and Him crucified. They want tomatoes to become cucumbers and pole beans to become beets. I have a propensity to be like that myself – if it isn’t a vegetable I enjoy I’m apt to ignore it whether it is in God’s garden or not. There is something not quite right with that.

A smart gardener rotates crops – planting the same thing year after year in the same soil is generally not smart. Yet – we think nothing of spending our entire lives growing the same perspectives, the same traditions, the same ways of doing things, the same way of identifying with the Kingdom of God, the same way of relating to people. Now if this same way is submission and obedience to the Scriptures that’s well and good – because the Scriptures lead us into an experience of life that is kaleidoscopic – the sixty-six books of the Bible will have us rotating our crops. Otherwise we will be sons and daughters of the tomato or the pole bean or the stand of corn – and we’ll uproot the squash and call it a weed.