Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Reap What Jesus Sowed

If you’re a gardener, you know the joy of harvesting fruits or vegetables that you’ve grown yourself.

You get to savour the fresh, delicious taste of home-grown produce. You’re quite literally enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Is there anything more satisfying?

How about reaping the benefits of what someone else has grown?

Perhaps you have a neighbour who gives you the excess from their own vegetable garden?

Or better yet, maybe you were as fortunate as a friend of mine. She and her family moved away from the big city a few years ago and bought a house in the suburbs, which sat on a large lot.

The previous owners of the house were botanists, so they had packed the property with beautiful and unusual perennials and shrubs. They’d also planted a number of fruit trees.

My friend and her family moved in mid-year, and didn’t need to do a lick of work in the mini-orchard in their new backyard. All they had to do was sit back and enjoy it, harvesting the fruit from trees that someone else had planted.

This reminds me of a verse from the Old Testament. Moses was telling the children of Israel that God would one day bring them into the Promised Land. Here’s how he described it:

“… a land with great and splendid cities that you did not build, with houses full of every good thing with which you did not fill them, with wells that you did not dig, and with vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant...” (Deuteronomy 6:10-12)

To me, this is a picture of what Christ has done for us.

In the old law-based covenant you reaped what you sowed, but in the new grace-based covenant we reap what Christ has sown.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Key to Stronger Faith

Chickadee Photo by Larry Doucet on Pixabay

A chickadee may have a bird-brain, but it can actually be pretty smart.

Especially if it lives in a harsh climate.

What does climate have to do with bird intelligence? As it turns out, more than you’d expect.

Biologists have discovered that chickadees living in the mountains or in northern latitudes, where the weather is more severe, were smarter than their peers living more comfortably down below.

Chickadees from harsher habitats had superior spatial memories and problem-solving abilities than those living in gentler climes. They were better at finding stored caches of food and at figuring out how to access a worm treat that scientists had cleverly tucked into a glass tube.

The harsh environment made their brains work a bit harder.

Is there a lesson for humans in the example of the chickadees?

Yes, but it isn’t to move to a more wintry climate (take it from a Canadian who’s done her share of shovelling snow—it hasn’t made me smarter!).

The takeaway here is that there can be unseen benefits to the challenges we face.

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