Let it Ripen: Being Patient for the Best Fruit

This is the first year that we’ve begun getting a harvest of blueberries and strawberries in our garden.

My strawberries are in a raised bed on the side of the house, the blueberries are in barrels on the front porch. The best part about the berries on the porch is that we can monitor their development easily. Extra watering, turning for optimal sun exposure, and watching for when it’s time to cover them with bird nets.

The big downside, is that we can watch the berries turning blue but my kids have trouble waiting for them to be really ripe.

We’ve been waiting since last year to get any berries at all from these bushes, and I know in future years there will be more, but it’s hard to wait. We see them turning blue, my son can’t resist the urge. But the taste is a tad disappointing. They aren’t bad, but not as sweet as they could be if they waited a bit longer. We have similar issue with the strawberries. A few more days in the sun and a little bit of rotation, the anemic looking berries would be a rich dark red and have a robust flavor.

I want to hurry up and publish the book that isn’t ready because I’m not confident I’ll keep my nerve. I push a child to read or do math beyond her level because I fear an unspoken public pressure or an arbitrary deadline. I lift with weights too heavy for me, and injure myself, setting back my fitness, because I got impatient with my slowing growing strength.

We can’t rush what we are growing any more than we can make a pregnancy go faster. Babies develop at a regular rate, and yet their arrival is not predictable. I feel like this is true of spiritual growth as well. We know it is happening, even when we can’t see it.

We walk through this life, not knowing the number of our days. For some of us it is as long 100 or so years, witness to multiple generations and shifts of culture and technology. For others it’s only a few days or moments. Both have value.

I cannot will myself to understand God better on a certain time table. I can immerse myself in the words of God and his people, but I cannot accelerate my ripening.

Some of us are in a season of ripening, we see the changing of the colors and the plumpness of the fruit, but we aren’t sure when it’s time to harvest. I’ve discovered that we don’t have to worry too much about that. God, in his wisdom, usually makes it very clear though, in my experience, it rarely looks as I expect.

It looks like realizing I made it through the last year of my life one day at a time, despite not being sure how we’d make it. It looks like worrying less over things that used to consume me. The child who never used to sleep does, the one who used to wet the bed doesn’t. Suddenly they can dress themselves, make their own sandwiches and do laundry and it is both wonderful and scary. Because even as I grow, those around me do too.

I want to somehow pause time, so I can hurry up and do my own maturing while they wait. Because I’m convinced I could be a better mother, wife, daughter and friend if I could just hurry up and grow up some more. But that’s not how it works.  Instead I grow as they do.

They must forgive my failings and tolerate my growing pains, just as I do theirs. My children must tolerate an imperfect parent, and my husband an imperfect wife, my heavenly Father, an imperfect child. But I don’t just remain in my sinful, imperfectness, I allow myself to continually be made new.

After every ugly word, unkind thought, unwise action and misplaced plan, I get to start again. I begin again, and yet not from the very beginning, because all that comes before is part of the foundation, part of the soil that grows new and more beautiful things.

Sometimes we just wake up one day and the berries are ready for picking, and no amount of wishing will slow or speed the process. So I continue to water them, rotate them, fertilize them until the harvest is ready.