Have you ever asked a friend what to do about a situation that you are in and then you put off acting on his or her advice? I would guess that most, if not all of us, have done that. This week, I decided that I had procrastinated long enough (more than two months) and was so glad that the situation was resolved within a couple of days of when I asked for help. I am very thankful for the friends that the Lord has given Karen and me.

We have also been blessed by the spiritual insights of many Christian authors, including Linda Evans Shepherd. In her book “When You Need to Move a Mountain,” Shepherd writes: “A homeowner ran out of grass seed in the middle of seeding his new lawn, so he sent his teenaged son to the hardware store to buy more. When his son brought back a bag of an entirely different variety of seed, the man didn’t notice and comingled the new seed with the original seed across his entire yard. The result? The man had different colors, shades, varieties, and densities of grass dotting his lawn.

‘Now what do I do?’ he lamented. ‘The unwanted seed is springing up faster than my chosen seed. It’s choking the life out of the lawn I tried to plant.’ Oops! Planting the wrong seed can create a multitude of problems. It can create a harvest of the exact thing you don’t want or need.

Imagine you believed you were planting an apple orchard and were dreaming of all the apple pies you’d be able to bake, but after years of cultivating your trees, you discovered they were the ornamental crabapple variety, the kind that produces no fruit. Oops! No amount of sugar, flour, or butter could fix that case of mistaken identity.

Or let’s say you planted zucchini in your garden, but unknown to you, your organic compost contained seeds of an unknown origin. A few weeks later, as you watched the flowering vines spread across your garden, you wondered why many of your zucchinis were so round. How surprised you were when the zucs turned orange and grew into pumpkins. Oops! At least your crop was edible, though entirely different than what you’d intended.

But worse yet, imagine a farmer who planted good seed, but an enemy snuck into his field one night and sprinkled in seeds that produced weeds. Oops!

Jesus told this story as a parable. He described how the farmer’s servants looked to the farmer for a solution.

‘The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’

‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn’ (Matt. 13:28-30).”

Shepherd continues: “These stories make me look at what I’ve been planting in my own life. There are times I’ve planted the wrong seeds into my heart and allowed woundedness, wrong thinking, bitterness, and even sin to take root, not realizing an unwanted harvest would result. Other times I thought I was planting good into my life, yet I allowed bad things to take root, with not great results. Then there were the times the enemy himself sprinkled seeds of doubt and faithlessness into my seeds of faith, hope, and love. The resulting crop was unexpected, because I hadn’t realized the enemy had been in my garden, and I soon discovered the enemy’s tares were difficult to weed.”

May we commit our ways completely to the Lord, asking Him to remove anything that hinders us from growing in Him and sharing His Word with others.

Scripture for the weekend: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit shall from the Spirit reap eternal life.” Galatians 6:7-8 (NASB)

Thought for the weekend: “Among the blessings and enjoyments of this life, there are few that can be compared in value to the possession of a faithful friend.” – James C. Gibbons

Steve