Spring blooms just make me happy. And it's those very blooms that I want to talk about.
As I was outside in this gorgeous Spring weather (6 days before Spring is officially here) working in the yard, I had another epiphany. It seems to be a 'thing' with me. I often 'epiph' when I do manual labor. Anyways, we thought it would be smart to dig up a lot of our weeds before everything got green and buggy in just a few weeks, making our job much, much harder. It was such a huge success. We cleared a bunch of dead growth, over-grown weeds and brush.
As I was weeding the garden today, I had to pull all the old, dry, dead weeds up by the roots. Many of those roots were covered with leaves. When I moved the leaves away to see if I was getting at the root, I noticed new growth already starting at the very bottom of each weed. Hmmm, I thought to myself, that's odd. The weed is already growing but I can't see any result of it above the leaves, its only down here in the dirt and on the inside.
This is where my epiphany starts to get good: Hmmm....I wonder if that's like us. We think we see new growth when we see the 'fruit' show up in our lives, but maybe the growth is happening on the inside and deep underneath the soil where no one can see. The fruit is the result of growth happening, not the growth itself.
Pretty deep, huh?! We praise others when we see beautiful fruit in their lives. But the fruit or flowers only come after what appears to be a dormant season. Growth has to happen first. During the dormant season when things don't feel so good and/or things look rather bleak, that's when the real growth is occurring. Growth doesn't always look pretty, but the fruit or bloom does. We reap the benefit of those inward struggles at the end of all that mental/spiritual wrestling when we finally see the 'fruit' in due season.
