Seed. Time. Harvest

I would love to blame my impatience on society. I really would. I would really like to blame Amazon solely for this uncomfortable feeling of waiting. Being a Prime member means that those items with those five magic, blue letters next to them (Prime) I will receive in two business days. I won’t lie. If the item is not eligible for Prime shipping, I keep scrolling and am complaining that that seller has the nerve to not get it to me in 48 hours. I get annoyed when the car in front of me doesn’t go the second the light turns green. However, don’t you be honking at me if I don’t move right away! I will put my car in park, sit on the hood and feed the birds for an hour!

You ever put something in the microwave and that 2 minutes feels like 2 hours and you’re thinking: Why don’t you hurry up? You ever been in a drive through line and you place your ridiculously long and customized order and you are losing your ever-loving mind because it took longer than 3 minutes to prepare it? The audacity of these people! How about if the Wi-Fi is slow or not working at Starbucks? The world may as well end! How are we supposed to check Instagram? Maybe you’re at the restaurant and you place your order and the people at the table next to you came in 20 minutes after you did and they got their food first. Oh snap! You let out that passive aggressive huff of air with the death glare as if it’s the fault of the people next to you.  

If something in the previous two paragraphs didn’t make you nod in agreement or smile a little bit, you are a much better person than I am. You have a greater understanding of patience than I presently have. I so wish I could tell you that I am a laid-back, go with the flow type of guy. I remember one guy told me years ago: “Steve, don’t sweat the small stuff.” I haven’t talked to him since. I wrote a column last October titled: “The Process Leads to the Promise”. I believe that. I do. But just because I believe it, doesn’t mean that I still don’t struggle to accept it and live by that truth.

I believe that there is a principle in the earth today: seed, time, and harvest. We all love the harvest, the results, the pay off. But most of us (myself at the top of the list) really struggle with the time aspect of this truth. We have created an environment that not only is used to results immediately but demand it and when that demand is unmet (no matter how unrealistic it may be), we have a tendency to get really upset and in some cases, just quit.

I cannot stress enough how key timing is to breakthrough and success in life. If we will let the process do in us what it is supposed to do, then when the harvest comes it will not crush us. Often times struggles in our lives are the byproduct of us forcing ourselves into seasons that we are not yet ready for because we don’t like the process and we don’t want to be developed. We want to be full steam ahead at all times and be in the harvest. So, we get ourselves into places that we don’t have the strength to handle yet because we skipped the process. I wish I could drop my body off at the gym and pick it back up when it’s ready but unfortunately it does not work that way. I would be skipping the process and trying to lift a weight that I do not have the strength for or run a distance that I have not conditioned myself for yet. That is a guaranteed way to severely hurt and damage myself.

Friend, a waiting season is never a wasted season. Don’t settle for less just because it’s available. The compromises we make become the life we settle for. If you forfeit the process, you forfeit the promise.  I encourage you to not let the most urgent thing distract you from the most important thing. The truth you store up in silence comes back to you in the storm. Those seemingly small or unimportant things we conquer in the quiet times of life – in the process -- might just become the exact thing we’ll need later in life to handle the harvest that is coming.