What do you have? What do you see?

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What do you have?

What do you see?

The Bible says that when we are planted in the house of the Lord we will

in the courts of our God.

And goes on to say that we will

still bear fruit in old age.

Jesus said, Herein is my Father glorified that you bear much fruit.

I like to say this:

Bearing fruit, fruitfulness, is BETTER even than being successful or winning–even though the Bible has that covered, too.

Yes. Yes, I did.

Those scriptures paint a picture, do they not? 🖼️ 🎨 👩🏻‍🎨

What comes to your mind when I say:

Flourish?

Bear fruit?

Fruitfulness?

Profit?

In my Bible time, I was reading in the opening of John where it says about Jesus that to as many as RECEIVED Him He gave the authority to become children of God. And then says, we BEHELD His glory–full of grace and truth.

Beheld is a pretty old-timey word but it roughly means “saw”. 👀

Like with our own eyes we saw something.

Okay. So now we can go paint that picture, right? 🖼️ 🎨 👩🏻‍🎨

Go draw that for me.

Yeah. That isn’t as easy as, say, drawing a flower or a house.  🌷🏠

In that same first chapter of John, though, in verse 16 

That verse never fails to move me. 🥹

Just wow.

Grace is hard to paint a tangible picture of, but that verse describing it?

I’m telling you that if I were sitting in front of my Christmas tree and what was described–just grace and blessing and favor and gift going on and on being heaped upon me. If this were happening tangibly and in real life, I’d get uncomfortable. 

It would feel like too much.

And yet, for those who received Him, it says that we ALL have been given a share and were all supplied with exactly that.  

I asked at the beginning:

What do you have?

What do you see?

And then I did my best to make these words stand out:

RECEIVED

BEHELD

All had a share.

All were supplied with.

I know this sounds goofy, but I was reading these verses in my own quiet time and I thought about watching game shows when I was little and how on the Price is Right the announcer would come on and say, 

🤔 What does one do with that? 

🤔 How much would that be? 

🤔 Where would you put it?

And then I thought about people who own fruit trees. 

We moved to a house when I was in middle school and my mom was SO excited because it had a peach tree! It was a pretty unimpressive tree–not a very big one, but even that little tree living in our backyard in the desert yielded so much fruit that she carried around paper bags full of the fruit basically begging someone to take some off her hands. There were too many peaches.

Out of His abundance (of grace)

We were all supplied with grace upon grace, gift upon gift, favor upon favor…

Yes, please, Lord. And thank You.  🙏🏻

What do you have?

What do you see?

I am just going to be super honest here.

I sometimes see the work and the labor MORE than I see the fruit.

As in, “I’m doing all this work. Lord, I’m praying in line with Your Word that it will prosper. That what I do works.”

But I can sometimes be focused enough on MY part–the work, the labor, the effort, and yes, sometimes even the anguish and stress and difficulty of continuing when quitting sounds really good.

And it can turn into THAT being what I have and what I see. 😬

I picture the fruit coming “someday.” 📆💭

Someday this will bear fruit.

Someday this will work…I hope.

Those verses helped illuminate for me a place where I was limiting myself in terms of expectation.

God’s way is always, faithful over little, ruler over much.

Our part is the faithful.

Our part is the diligence.

But–our part isn’t JUST to plant the seeds and work the soil.

He gives us promises about the fruit, too.

Seedtime AND harvest.

Not just perpetual seedtime.

So. Off the top of my mind:

I ask again–and would genuinely love to hear back from you:

What do you have?

What do you see?

And is your answer different between when you started this and now?

I’d love to know both.  ❤️❤️❤️