My Trip to the Farm

As many of you may know, I spent the last couple of weeks helping out at First Fruits Produce, where I had worked - and pretty much lived - before David and I got married. It was a tremendous training ground for me in preparing for marriage, but I will have to tell that story in a different post. I just wanted to show and tell some of what went on while I was there.

For the most part, I worked with my friend Pavlina in the raised garden beds, weeding, picking, planting and pulling up lettuce. There was one day I helped to can some corn and one day I planted radishes, but the rest of the time was working with lettuce. This was certainly a little different than when I worked there in my single days, partly because I have two children now, and partly because the first time, lettuce was only part of my weekly work.

Here we were planting lettuce in the greenhouse. That's Pavlina's son on her back. Elisa was in a carrier on my back, too, and stayed happy for about an hour and a half every day. After that, she sometimes had to just persevere for a while.


Joshua seemed to enjoy himself on the farm, and helped himself to a little dirt now and then. Here he is, after eating some... The baby plants in the background on the right are lettuce. I'm not sure, but I think the other plants are geraniums.


Pavlina and I had many wonderful conversations as we worked, talking about what God's been speaking to us lately; about child-rearing; about being moms. One thing that really challenged me was when we began to talk about virtue - the virtue that Jesus had in Him which, when the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of His garment, He perceived had gone from Him. I believe God doesn't want us to be only "good Christians," just trying to live a "good" life, but He wants us to be pressing towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. In Revelation chapters 2-3 it talks about "he that overcometh." There's an action, a fervency even, if you will, with which we should be "earnestly contend[ing] for the faith."

How does this correspond with virtue? Well, this is just a thought on my part, but I wonder if, as we are overcoming and getting victory over the things in our sin nature - anger, self-centeredness, unclean thoughts... whatever is in us that is opposed to God - there is something created within us that wasn't there before: virtue. We certainly aren't born with Godly character; we need to acquire it. I believe God wants us to be able to pray for someone who is sick, and they will recover. Not necessarily that we would have the gift of healing per se, but the faith to believe God, the willingness to be used by God, and the nature of God within us, that we would be "vessel[s] unto honor, sanctified, and meet for the Master's use." (2 Tim. 2:21) Then God can work in us and through us.
KW