Who Controls the Future? Not Me!

"Corn Fields and Poppies" by Vincent Van Gogh, Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Here are some thoughts I wrote a while ago on a pair of Scriptures:

Mark 4:26-29
Jesus also said, "This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come."

I Corinthians 3:6-9
I (Paul) planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field, God's building.

Those are pretty cool when read together, don’t you think?

This is very timely for me right now: I’ve been thinking a lot about What Is My Purpose Here On Earth and all that. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis thing or something; I’m coming up on my 40th birthday soon. (If you see me buying a red sports car, stop me! Ha ha)

But, the thing is, much of what I do every day as a mother seems absolutely pointless. I mean, I wash clothes, and they get dirty again. I feed people, and they get hungry again. I clean the house, and it gets messed up again. It’s frustrating. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. At the end of the day, I look back and ask, “What have I accomplished today?” Rarely can I hold up some sort of finished product and say, “THIS! I completed this thing here!”

And sometimes it seems like the best thing I can say at the end of the day is, “The children are all still alive! I have sustained these five lives for one more day!” And maybe that IS enough. But I always feel like I’m falling short, that I’m not doing a good enough job as a mother. Especially when one or the other of them does something that makes me say, “What have I done WRONG that my child would ACT this way!” (Which is pretty much every day when there are so many of them. At least they take turns.) I worry about their futures, about what kind of people they will become, and what they’ll have to tell their therapists about me when they grow up.

Anyways, back to the Bible. What this Scripture is saying to me is, Just do YOUR job, and leave the finished product to God. As human beings, we want to control so many things that are really up to God. The truth is, we can’t even make a seed grow! We can do our part, planting and watering and all that, but ultimately, the result is in God‘s hands. HE must grow the seed. He controls the future, and we don’t.

And so what I have to do is trust God, and keep doing what He has set in front of me to do. And that’s both the easiest and the hardest thing about life!