Dead waste or potential goldmine?
19 March 08
A vast expanse of dry, dusty land. It doesn’t look as if anything will grow; it’s hot in the day, cold at night, and hardly has any rainfall. You wouldn’t choose to live there.
Then a load of manure is dumped on the land. As well as being dry and exposed to extremes of temperature, it now smells bad. Sort of adding insult to injury, really; the land is desolate enough as it is, so why dump poo on it?
Well, the poo breaks down, as we all know, and releases nutrients into the dry soil. Gradually the land is transformed from a dry and smelly waste into a richer, more fruitful area. Instead of just sand, it’s now a darker brown – but it’s still dusty. It’s still either very hot or very cold. There’s still nothing growing there.
Next, black rubber pipes appear on the land. They look a little like snakes, or gigantic pieces of liquorice abandoned by some enormous child. These pipes are punctured all along their length; no use trying to carry water in them, you’d think. Pipes aren’t supposed to have holes in.
Except that the punctures are meant to be there. They release water over the dessicated landscape, mixing with the newly-created soil and making it moist. It’s still brown and dingy, but there’s great potential for life there now.
You know where it’s going from here. A week later, the land is striped with furrows after being planted with seeds. A month later, the first green shoots are beginning to show. Three months later, the young plants are starting to bud, and you can see the fruit that will come. At harvest time, the land is green and lush, impassable because of the springy mass of plants. The fruit is sweet and tasty, fully ripened and matured.
This isn’t a cheesy sermon illustration. It’s a description of a farming project in the desert land of North Africa. Nothing special or out of the ordinary; this is just the way of life for many people. Yet it’s amazing to think of the people who look at the desert and see the potential for harvest. God allows some terrible things to happen to his people sometimes; it can feel as if we are alone and desolate, and then God dumps something else on us that just seems like the last straw. We feel abandoned and alone: Job in the Bible had an illness that was so ugly and smelly that even his wife avoided him – and this was after he lost his livelihood, his house and all his children. Yet God brings good things out of this suffering and produces an abundant harvest.
Recently, I had the privilege of meeting Dr Rebekka, a Christian who was imprisoned for two years in Indonesia for teaching Sunday school. She’s a truly amazing lady who radiates joy and peace – literally an awesome person to meet. Someone asked her how she had gained this deep knowledge of God, and she said, “If you want the relationship that I have with God now, you will have to suffer. The prison was my university of trust.”
Often when we have prayer requests from persecuted Christians, they don’t ask for the suffering to stop. They ask for the strength to stand, because they come to know God in an incredible way and want to give glory to him in their lives – and sometimes their deaths. We can do the same! These are ordinary people made extraordinary by clinging to God during their suffering. We can do that too. Oswald Chambers, a 19th-century preacher, said this:
The things that happen either make us fiends, or they make us saints; it depends entirely upon the relationship we are in to God.
Will you be a fiend or a saint in your harvest from the hard times?