When Buying Seeds…

While the rest of the world is posting about daffodils, we here in the Dakotas are still discussing inches of snow, below zero, and blizzard warnings. 

This is just the time of year that Jung Seed sends out its second catalog as a reminder that spring will indeed come, even in the Dakotas.

So, while it snowed ducks and geese out my window, I shopped for garden seeds. 

Pink popcorn, huge pumpkins, and mild cabbages appealed to my kids this year, and I read descriptions carefully, trying to avoid the seed mistakes I’ve made in the past.

My family laughs about the year I bought into “Lemon Cucumbers,” thinking that might mean more of a tangy flavor. 

Wrong. If I had read the description, I would have known that they would be small, seedy, round, yellow cucumbers that never did no good for nobody. 

Then, there was the time I bought pole beans instead of bush beans. Or the time I bought spaghetti squash seeds instead of summer squash. 

Lesson: If you don’t read the description, you are easily fooled.

After King David died, the Kingdom of Israel was torn in two, and the people were easily fooled into an old mistake. 

Jeroboam, who took over the ten tribes of Israel, was afraid that careful reading and observance of the Law would lead the people back to unity with Judah. So, he used an old trick to keep their business: “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough! Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

He constructed two golden calves, very like the one they had made in the desert, and he set one to the north and one to the south. 

Because they were experiencing proverbial winter in the form of political upheaval, the people were just anxious to buy into anything that promised spring. They didn’t bother to read the description. They didn’t bother to remember that the One, True, Living God is bigger and more real than both winter or seeds, political upheaval or idols. 

“Then, this thing became a sin, for the people went as far as Dan to be before one.”

It was their ruin.

A friend of ours used to brag and say that his wife told her friends he was a model husband. He would snicker then, and ask if we knew the definition of a model.

“A small imitation of the real thing!” He would laugh. 

Lemon cucumbers were worse than a small imitation of the real thing. They were an inedible disappointment that ruined a whole section of my garden. 

If I had just read the description, I would have known they didn’t match a real cucumber. I could have stopped the mistake before those seeds were ever planted!

How often have I fallen for selling out to the wrong thing just because I was desperate for relief, in need of an antidote, tired of waiting on God to act?!

Don’t settle for a small imitation of the real thing! Our God is a Living God, and His description is there for the reading in your Bible, and He invites you to “taste and see” that He is good for yourself.