Reflection - June 17, 2025
A return and a meditation
I know it has been almost a month since my last writing…the end of the school year is always a crazy time and I have found myself pulled between competing responsibilities. Even as I write this, I am in Dallas attending a conference. I will do my best to continue writing regularly throughout the summer, although perhaps not in the regular rhythms and series of the past.
Break my heart if that’s what it takes
Find me faithful
Good fruit takes time to grow
Mold me shape me, change me daily,
Find me faithful
Good fruit takes time to grow
One of my favorite songs right now is “Fruit Takes Time” by SEU Worship. I have printed the bridge above.
I don’t know if you ever feel this way, but I feel like this is the way I feel all. the. time.
Waiting.
I feel like I have spent my whole life waiting for something. Waiting to find my calling and purpose. Waiting to find a spouse. Waiting for our kids to be born. Waiting for the grief to go away. Waiting for the plan to become clear. Waiting for God to say something, do something, change something, move something.
Waiting, waiting, waiting.
But you know, as time-bound creatures, I am reminded that waiting is a human construct.
God is never waiting. He is present to everything in “real time” as it were.
He doesn’t find Himself sitting looking at His wristwatch hoping that things would just speed up and get here already!! In fact, quite the opposite.
The God of the Bible is the God of the process.
Just ask Abraham and Sarah. Or Moses. Or Joseph. Or David. Or Samuel. Or Hannah. Or Mary and Joseph. Or…yourself.
We are those accustomed to the experience of time, of yearning, of hope and expectation. We don’t always get what we want, and we certainly don’t always get what we want immediately.
Because the process of fruit and yield is designed to be formative in itself. The end of the journey is not the sole goal. The journey itself, with its ups and downs and turnarounds, is a gift from God for the profound shaping of our hearts and minds upward towards God, inwards towards self, and outwards toward others.
Which is why, I think, this song speaks so deeply to the longings of my impatient heart.
In another place, they sing,
Thank God, Your ways are better than mine
Indeed, the ways of God are not our ways and the thoughts of God are not our thoughts. And honestly, thank God for that.
I can’t tell you how many times in my life that if things were up to me, I would have given up, or chosen a different path, or made a different choice.
Even as I sit writing this in Texas, I am 70 miles as the crow flies from a house that we lived in for 364 days in a short stint of ministry here. Being here has filled me with all kinds of emotion - joy at the friendships and enduring relationships, encouragement at the good work God continues to do in His people, and grief in the idea that I only got to experience it for such a short amount of time.
If I had been in charge of my life, I would have chosen a lot more time in Texas with my friends and mentors.
But I realize that that season was an incubator. I may not see the fruit of it for years and years. I may never know the deepest and truest impacts it had in my life.
Surely you can relate to this.
You have seasons, spaces, and places of deep joy intermixed with questions, grief, pain and unresolved tensions.
You probably even ask yourself/God:
“God…what was THAT about?!?”
But sometimes, fruit takes time.
Sometimes, it’s probably just better to say, “Thank God, your ways are better than mine.”
At least, that is where I would invite us to sit. To sit in a place that dwells in the promises of God…the deep and true desire of His heart for us.
Oh, the joys of those who do not
follow the advice of the wicked,
or stand around with sinners,
or join in with mockers.
But they delight in the law of the Lord,
meditating on it day and night.
They are like trees planted along the riverbank,
bearing fruit each season.
Their leaves never wither,
and they prosper in all they do.
But not the wicked!
They are like worthless chaff, scattered by the wind.
They will be condemned at the time of judgment.
Sinners will have no place among the godly.
For the Lord watches over the path of the godly,
but the path of the wicked leads to destruction.