The Mirror of the Word and other works by C.E. White can be purchased on her website, cewhitebooks.com or on Amazon.

“So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.” 

—1 Corinthians 3:7

We like to live in the harvest, where the fruit of our labors is always visible. I’m so glad God gave us this illustration because watching any farmer will show us that’s not how it works.

The fruit will come in its time, but it may look like nothing at all is growing for quite a while.

We plant; we water; we wait. We water some more and wait some more.

If the farmer didn’t have the evidence of harvests witnessed year after year, putting all that seed in the ground would seem like a ridiculous waste of time. It would just look like digging a hole and burying a dead thing.

Many times, God asks us to plant. Maybe the “seed” looks completely dead to us, and we can’t imagine how it could ever possibly grow. If we’ve never watched him work before, planting will likely feel like a waste of time. Yet before we even begin to see results, God asks us to spend more time and energy to water. It feels pointless and risky.

But if he asks us to plant and water, the rest is up to him. We may never even see the harvest. John 4:37 says, “One sows, and another reaps.”

The planting and watering are never futile when we’re doing them at God’s direction. We can trust that he will bring the growth in his way and in his time, whether we are there to see it or not.

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