It’s spring training season! The Major League Baseball teams have gathered in Florida and Arizona. Veteran players are shaking off the rust and trying to hold off Father Time for another year. Young prospects are doing their best to get noticed. In the dugout, managers and coaches scrutinize every pitch, every play, to decide who stays, who goes to the minor leagues, and who is released. The investment that these teams put into each prospect is no small matter. Beyond paying the players, there’s the matter of lodging, meals, equipment, and paying for the best coaches they can find. Some of these players will come back year after year in hopes of showing enough improvement to be called up to the Big Show. But at some point, the team decides that a particular player has peaked and isn’t worth any further investment. The player is released.

[The orchard’s owner] said to the gardener, ‘For three years now I have come in search lf fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?’ Luke 13:7

This parable puts fear into me. Do I bear enough fruit, or am I in danger of being cut down like an unproductive fig tree? God invests an awful lot in us, and He would be well within His rights to cut us off if we don’t bear fruit. God, please give me more time! I promise to do better! And indeed, in His infinite patience, He does. The owner in the gospel reading says he’s been checking on that fig tree for three years, and he’s given up on it. But I did a little research: Fig trees on their own root systems begin bearing fruit at 3 to 4 years of age. So, God is like the gardener in this story. He knows fig trees. He ought to; He created them!

[The gardener] said to him in reply, ‘Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.’ Luke 13:8-9

God continues to cultivate the ground around us and fertilize it, year after year, to give us every opportunity to grow and ultimately produce. In baseball terms, instead of being cut, we’re being sent to the minors where the team will invest time and effort in coaching us and showing patience for another year. But unlike baseball, we can trust that He’ll continue to cultivate and fertilize us until we bear fruit. And unlike baseball, God will never release us!

We pray:
O Master of all Orchards, we do not always produce for You in the way that we should. When we fall short, cultivate us with Your word and fertilize us with Your body and blood. As long as we follow Your perfect teaching, we cannot help but make it to the Big Show some day. We ask this through Your Son, who gives us our own spring training — Lent — to practice and get better. Amen

Jeff
A Lecturer from Colchester, CT
Shared by permission of the author