The email said the picking was “good”! So I woke up early, drove to the orchard, grabbed a blueberry bucket, and hunted down just the right bush to begin. My eyes quickly scanned the bush for fruit. I found one berry here, and one there and another berry over here. My heart completely sank. I came with an expectation that “good” meant the berries would be in clumps ready to fall easily off the bush. But what I found was the opposite. The blueberries were scattered, with more green unripe berries than deep blue “ready to eat” ones. Suddenly I overheard a woman echoing my own thoughts, “This picking is hard!” I was comforted knowing I was not alone in my feelings. And that’s when the Holy Spirit gently began to speak to my heart, “Who says it’s not good picking? To the farmer, it is!” It was the perfect time to start picking this delicious fruit.
My mind drifted towards my faith-based daily planner business. Just like picking these berries, developing a business can feel slow and difficult. And sometimes the temptation to give up is strong. But just because a journey is hard, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pursuing. And then it hit me:
Bite-size truth #1: Whether things are going well or not, it’s all a matter of perspective! The “hard” can produce in us the character He wants us to develop. Lean into the hard and keep going.
My mind jolted back to my task at hand. So I did, I kept going; and little by little my bucket of blueberries began to get fuller and fuller. The persistence paid off and soon my bucket was full of deep blue luscious fruit! A bountiful amount of produce for the winter. In that moment I was reminded that:
Bite-size truth #2: Slow but steady eventually gets the job done.
And not just that, but I also realized I needed to look all around the blueberry bush from various angles to find more fruit.
Bite-size truth #3: Sometimes in life we need to step back from our situation and look at it from a different angle or a new perspective. That intentional zooming out of a situation can really help us see the truth or give us a fresh perspective to solve that problem.
That day I set out to pick blueberries, but I’m so glad God had other plans for me. He met me right where I was at, in the muck of hard things in life. If I had not been in tune with his voice, I would have missed these lessons and left discouraged, on the brink of giving up.
But this was just the beginning of my time with God …