If I had known they were going to give me such a poignant lesson I would have taken pictures.

There were two of them.

Very green with specks of yellow.

I was so excited. 

Two tomato plants fresh from the store with blossoms already on them! Yippee! 

I didn’t pluck them off. And the longer I waited — well, I just couldn’t. You know what I mean? 

And so the yellow blossoms in time became tiny, tiny green tomatoes. I sure couldn’t pull them off then!

And so they grew. But the plants didn’t grow much, hardly any at all the truth be told. Poor little things. They were putting all they had into growing fruit on little stems and branches starving for nutrients themselves. Spindly little things they were. Sad but valiant. 

And today because the plants look so flat-out worn out, I plucked the fruit. 

Yep! that’s it. The whole crop!

Short-sighted, sentimental, whatever label to give my reasoning, (or lack of reasoning) my harvest is way limited. And why? It’s simple really. The plants were too immature to support the fruit. The stem, the root system, the plant as a whole needed more growing of its own before it tackled growing a crop.

If we want a future harvest of plenty, be it tomatoes or life, sometimes we have to cut off even some things that look good to give strength and nourishment for better things. Even things we are excited about and would really like to keep – good things — we have to be brave enough to pinch ’em off!

If I had plucked off the specks of yellow, cultivated some organic bone meal in the soil, watered well and patiently waited — well, we won’t know that now, not this go round. But I am already planning for next season.

So do you have some yellow specks that need pinching off? You just might get a bumper crop later if you do the brave thing today.

. . . and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, so that it may bear more fruit.

3 Right now, because of the word which I have spoken to you, you are pruned.

4 Stay united with me, as I will with you — for just as the branch can’t put forth fruit by itself apart from the vine, so you can’t bear fruit apart from me.

5 “I am the vine and you are the branches. Those who stay united with me, and I with them, are the ones who bear much fruit; because apart from me you can’t do a thing.

via John 15 KJV;CJB – I am the true vine, and my Father is – Bible Gateway.

Day 203 of 2014, a day to give Thanks.

Kathie

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Praying for Friends, Janet & Steve, Sheila and others.