Surprised by God’s Blessings
One of the things I value most in my life are my talks with my mom. My mom lives half a country away from me, deep in southern Missouri. She loves God. She loves her family, and she loves the land. She is a constant source of strength for me, especially these last few years of court battles and financial hardships. She encourages me and believes in me when I don’t believe in myself. It is not an easy thing to be a single mother and solo parent raising six children on a teacher’s salary. It’s even more challenging when you are continuing to be abused and have to constantly stand in an arena of self-defense because abusers do not change. Time and time again, I have faltered and fallen.
When I get overwhelmed and hurt deep in my soul, it is easy to look at all my failures and wonder how did I get to where I am? How come my marriage didn’t work out? Why is my family broken? How did I take a left instead of a right? Why did I get hurt on the job? How did I financially end up in such a mess? Couldn’t I have done better? And because of my PTSD, I just loop and focus on all the wrong things. I have thought I was too beaten up to rise again, and so I call my mom. To cheer me up, she likes to tell me stories from her farm, and her most recent one was about the goats eating her brussel sprout patch.
My mom has a lot of different animals on the farm: cows, sheep, chickens, horses, pigs, and goats. Each one has their own sort of style, but her favorite are her goats. Goats are lively creatures. They love to play and jump. They are always happy and they stick together in the herd, but they are also notorious escape artists! Because of the cleft in their hooves and the strength of their hind quarters, goats have incredible jumping power and get out of almost any enclosure you have them in - even a ten foot paneled fence. I know from having my own goat herd once upon a time!
Well, one day, my mom came home from work, and as she was driving up her dirt road, she saw that the goats had broken out of their pen. She parked her car and began herding the goats back into their pens, but as she did so she noticed that her beautiful brussel sprout patch had been completely decimated. The goats had spent the day enjoying her brussel sprout patch, and now all that remained were tiny little broken shoots. There were no flowers. No heads of tiny cabbages. Not even leaves. All that remained were trampled plants and little stubs of what promised to be a great harvest.
Now if there is anything about the farm that my mom loves more than her goats, it is her gardens. The gardens are her pride and joy, and I could hear the sadness in her voice as she told me about her brussel sprouts. However, I was so caught up in my own troubles that brussel sprouts and goats weren’t really where my focus was. I live a very different life than my mom, and like a lot of daughters I sometimes am not as patient with my mom as I should be, but she continued nonetheless.
Devastated by the brussel sprouts patch and annoyed at her goats, it was too late to replant and she was too tired to try to salvage anything, so she left it. A reminder of disappointment and heartache. A painful image of broken hope and despair. She secured the goat pen tighter, but the brussel sprout patch was a loss. But, my mom continued (as I rolled my eyes wondering the point of this story), she began to notice that by the end of the week, some of those broken stalks had turned green again. By the second week, they had begun to grow taller, and by the third week some had even begun to flower. Within four weeks, not only had the brussel sprout patch completely come back to life, but it was actually fuller and more productive than what she had originally planted. In all the devastation, there came a surprise blessing of bountifulness!
Now I listened more closely.
Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you work, goats just come in and destroy your brussel sprout patch leaving you hurt, angry, and full of shame that you didn’t do better? I do! Constantly. I often wonder what I am doing wrong, and why things aren’t easier for me like they appear to be for others. I wonder why I don't have the same blessings as other women: solid careers, intact families, loving marriages, beautiful homes, and fat bank accounts. I have done my best to honor God and do right by my family, and yet goats destroy the fruit of my labor and I am left looking at broken shoots and trampled leaves.
The Psalmist, David, often felt this way, too. In Psalm 25, he writes “Do not let me be put to shame nor let my enemies triumph over me…see how my enemies have increased and how fiercely they hate me (v. 2, 19).” Hunted by King Saul, David knew what it was like to despair. To have broken dreams and a broken heart. He knew what it was like to know he had something good and not have it come to fruition. But David also knew that if He put his hope in God and not in what he saw around him, that God would be faithful to him. He writes, “according to Your love remember me, for You are good, oh Lord….all the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful (v 7, 10).”
I know that I often struggle to see the goodness of God in the midst of my own personal struggles, but there is nothing that God cannot redeem, and like my mom’s brussel sprout patch, sometimes there is an even greater blessing waiting for us on the other side of what we consider devastation. God’s Word is clear, “No one whose hope is in You will ever be put to shame (v. 3).” Our responsibility is to fear the Lord, put our hope in Him, and keep our eyes ever on the Lord (v. 5, 12, 15). We are to listen to his instruction, and do our best to stay close to him (v. 4, 5, 8, 9, 12). IF we do that; IF we walk with integrity and uprightness (v. 21), then He will confide in us, and we will spend our days in prosperity and our “descendants will inherit the land (v. 13, 14).
I don’t know about you, but promises like that give me hope! They give me hope that God will be faithful to me when the hard times come. That He will stay by my side and guide me, and even better - He will redeem all the brussel sprout patches in my life. And not only will He redeem them, He will bless my children. God always gives more than we expect, He just doesn’t always do it the way we expect Him, too. We see devastation, but God sees a double harvest! So if you are struggling today, take refuge in the Lord - His heart is to rescue you, redeem you, and bless you. Draw close to Him, and He will be faithful. Continue to honor His Word, and watch and see.
