Planted in the House of the Lord

Grocery delivery apps are all the rage these days, and I can’t deny the convenience of tapping your finger a few times and seeing your week’s shopping dropped on the doorstep. But there is one aspect of this trend that seems to make a lot of shoppers nervous — fruits and vegetables.

A lot of us have strong opinions on our fresh produce and aren’t ready to delegate this highly subjective selection process to a total stranger. My father was a produce manager and I remember as a child learning about the complexities of choosing correctly. Getting a bad bag of under ripe tomatoes after shopping on an app could easily sour one on the whole idea.

Forrest Gump said life is like a box of chocolates. I say, we’re all like grab-bags of produce dumped on someone’s doorstep — but if we’re Christians who live our faith publicly, we’re stamped with the name of God. If your thumb is green enough, you know that you can tell a lot about a gardener from the produce he grows. We who are planted in the house of the Lord — what do we reveal about our Gardener?

What do our actions show of His teachings? What do our words reflect of His voice? What does our strength reveal of the soil from which we sprang and the life-giving waters that nourished us?

When we open ourselves up to those we encounter, let’s make a special effort to show the care we have had — lest our peers come away from the experience thinking God doesn’t know how to garden, when in reality, it’s us who don’t always know how to grow.

— Tracy Earl Welliver, MTS