In Other Words

"These children are the seeds my days plant, the blooms of the next generations."
~ Ann Voskamp ~
"Holy Experience"

Ann is my favorite writer in the blogosphere! Her metaphors are so strong and beautiful, and this quote is a great example. Though I'm still catching up from Crazy Week, I'm giving myself the speed-writing challenge this morning of meditating on Ann's words.

What comes to mind is a concept I first read about in college called "delayed gratification." If I remember rightly, it's a sign of psychological health if you can get your work done first and then reward yourself by doing something more pleasurable. (Immediate gratification, by contrast, is when you give yourself what you want right now--generally a less healthy approach to life.)

Motherhood--parenthood--is a long exercise in delayed gratification. In a literal way, we plant the seeds of our children, then wait nine months to see them as babies, and another 18 years or more for them to mature. Metaphorically, we plant the seeds of character, of virtue, of love for God and others, in their lives every day. We water those seeds. We pluck out the weeds. We stake up and fertilize the young plants. We shelter them from storms. We prune them when needed.

But often we don't even know, for many years, what kind of a plant we are cultivating! Will this child be a towering oak? That one a lovely, fruitful pear tree? A bold sunflower? A small but hardy wildflower? An ever-bearing strawberry? A vigorous grapevine?

We are rewarded, from time to time, with a growth spurt, with new limbs, buds, even the occasional blooms. These encourage us to continue watering, weeding, pruning and fertilizing in anticipation of the time when the plant will be mature and fulfill its purpose of bearing fruit. What that fruit will be, we don't know, but with the anticipation of a gardener, a farmer, a vinedresser, we lovingly, sacrificially tend the plants we are given, putting off our desires for self-gratification in the present in anticipation of a gratifying harvest in the future.

We hear, from the blooms of previous generations, that it will be worth it. We hear of the joys of grandchildren, of new sons and daughters gained by godly marriages, of seeing the fruit of your labors serving the Lord with all their might, of receiving their love and care in our old age. Surely those blooms we have anticipated will be all the more beautiful because of the years we have waited and worked and prayed to see them! And surely they will bloom the more brilliantly because of our faithful tending.

In the event of a disappointment at harvest time, may we still deserve and receive the gratification of God's words to us, "Well done, good and faithful servant." And may we find, at the harvest, that some of the blossoms, those of the deepest and richest beauty, are our own--the fruits that the Spirit has been nurturing in us as we have delayed gratifying our flesh, and submitted our desires to His own.