Voices: How being a Christian is like growing asparagus

Planting a garden is a great joy for me. I do it every spring.

My Aunt Donna taught me how to garden, how to prepare the soil, how to tend to the plants, how and when to harvest, and how to can—preserve—what we produce. She even helped me set up my garden the first three years. It was a great time as a family to learn and fellowship together.

My first two years really produced—green beans, black-eyed peas, squash, zucchini, tomatoes, potatoes, okra, jalapeño peppers, bell peppers, lettuce, cabbage and onions. I canned so many green beans, my thumbs turned green. But the green thumb has faded back to flesh color.

The last few years, I still can master squash, zucchini, cucumbers—I recently added this to my garden and make some pretty good kosher dill pickles—tomatoes, onions and black-eyed peas. For some reason, my potatoes and green beans have not produced. Pray for me.

Lori and I have started to like asparagus. We eat it often. So, I decided to grow it in the garden.

Growing asparagus

Now, the asparagus growing is a different animal entirely. When I plant seeds for a vegetable, the normal cycle is a sprout, a plant, leaves, little flowers, then edible vegetables. The cycle begins and concludes in the spring to early summer.

But asparagus? You have two options for planting it. You can plant the seeds, or you can plant the crowns. What’s the difference? To be honest, I can hardly tell.

Here’s what I am told: Crowns will produce a crop in around two years or longer. Seeds will produce a crop in three years or longer.

Here’s what I know: You plant seeds or crowns and nothing happens.

I planted some with the rest of the vegetable plants, then tilled over them each year because I thought they did not take or because I forgot where I planted them. The more I read, the more I realized I would have to set up a special place in the garden off to the side where I wouldn’t till.

I planted the crowns and forgot about them. Now, the last two years, the weird-looking plant with a feathery-looking leaf system popped up. That is all. I had no idea where the asparagus we’d eat would come from. The root? The leaves? I got so bored, I really didn’t care.

But this year, I pulled the weeds back from what looked like asparagus plants, and popping up beside them were a few asparagus spears coming right up out of the soil. I broke a few off because I read that’s what you do, but it’s hard to make a meal out of two asparagus spears.

I am told to wait a few more years, and we will be doing some fine eating. Tell that to a starving man: “In a few years, you’ll get a meal from your labor.”

The long wait

I went to the feed store the other day to get some range cubes for my cows. We were talking gardens and asparagus. The lady at the counter told me, last year, she and her husband decided to help her mom clean out her flower beds. Her husband dove in with both hands. He pulled everything that wasn’t flowering.

The mom walked out to see the work. With an alarmed gasp, she said, “You pulled all my asparagus plants up!”

The daughter and son-in-law looked at each other, having no idea what that meant. She explained, in their good deed, they wiped out four years of work that would take another four years to get her cherished asparagus back.

We all grow differently

Why all this? God works in our lives. I wish after we give him our hearts we would start producing fruit soon thereafter, and all could see lives fully living for him. Sadly, we often get saved, but no one can tell. It is a slow process.

The Lord tends to the seed he has placed inside of us. He tills around it. He pulls the weeds. He waters. He nurtures. Patiently, he works with us knowing what he will complete what he began.

Then some well-meaning, bone-headed, clumsy Christian comes and disturbs, even tries to pull up what he has been doing in a person. We grow impatient with others. Why do they not change? Why do they keep messing up? We see no fruit. So, they must not be Christian.

We slam them. We criticize them. We want their plant to be like our plant. But they’re not like us. We all grow differently.

The Father knows each of us intricately. He knows our nature. He knows how long it will take and what is needed. Jesus said don’t pull the weeds around the plants too early, because it is hard to tell the two apart.

Let God do his work. In time, we can tell the difference, because the plant will bear fruit in its season.

Johnny Teague is the senior pastor of Church at the Cross in West Houston and the author of several books. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.