New Voices: By and about young adults

Some people find it strange that I enjoy eating tomatoes like they’re apples, but it happens to be one of my favorite foods.

Sadly, I’m nearing the end of the harvest of my delicious Purple Haze heirloom tomatoes. This particular growing season has been spectacular, and the produce has been enormous and bursting with flavor, so I’ve had an abundance of these delicious snacks.

But it wasn’t just the size and juiciness of the tomatoes that made them especially delicious this year. There was an additional factor. For the first time, I saved seeds from a previous year’s heirloom tomato and raised them from seeds to mature plants.

Last fall, I carefully extracted seeds from a tomato, meticulously rinsed and dried them, and kept them through the winter. As the first signs of spring broke through the winter, I watched a few online instructional videos, planted the seeds in starter soil and waited for the first green of seedlings to break through the surface.

The tiny plants grew quickly at first, with each day marking visible changes. Eventually, I potted them so that the roots could expand and grow. Then as the days grew warmer, I slowly introduced them into the wind and direct sunlight of the outdoors.

But each evening, I took them back in so that the cold of the spring nights would not kill the fragile plants. Eventually, when they were sufficiently hardened to the natural elements, I put the strongest plants into the ground.

Suddenly, they didn’t seem so large. Instead of being the sturdy plants that had started as tiny seedlings, they seemed vulnerable in the great space of the garden.

As I watered and watched the plants to look for continued growth, I instead saw yellowing leaves that began falling off. Since it was my first time growing the plants from seed, I assumed I had done something wrong and feared they would soon die from whatever mistake I had made.

However, after a few tenuous days, new, bright green growth pushed out, and the plants reached higher. The growth was slow but visible.

Clearly the plants were becoming stronger and more deeply rooted.

After weeks of the plants maturing, the first flowers appeared. For a tomato lover, the time between the appearance of the first flower and a mature red (or in this case purple) tomato is excruciating. But after more waiting, I finally experienced the fruits of my labor. How sweet they were!

As it turned out, the extended process of nurturing these plants was therapeutic for me. It served as a metaphor that I needed.

Like growing tomato plants, sometimes life seems fruitless. Sometimes our faith seems more full of questions and doubts than full of new life and visible growth.

Like plants introduced to the natural elements of the outdoors, painful and difficult circumstances can feel like they will break us.

At one point this summer, we went through a stretch of unseasonably cold weather, and the tomatoes stopped ripening. This reminded me of times when it feels like my own growth and fruitfulness feels plateaued or stagnant.

There are many stages in the development of a tomato plant that are vital to its fruitfulness that don’t provide any immediate reward to the gardener. Likewise, there are important stages to our own growth as people that are deep but not particularly spectacular. Developing strong roots is invisible, much like the development of character.

Perhaps it is no surprise that gardening and tending to these plants spoke to me and became a metaphor for life and faith. After all, the teachings of Jesus are full of agricultural metaphors—scattering seed, fruitless fig trees, pruning grape vines and tiny mustard seeds.

There is much to these organic processes that parallels our lives. As I consider this, part of what I take from my tomato plant experience is a more patient and gracious understanding about life, faith and character. It applies to the people around me, but also to my own life.

Waiting for growth and fruit can be agonizing, whether it is in the life of someone else or within me. But sometimes there is more to the story than what we see.

One of the beautiful things about growing a plant is that, even with all the work and time I invest, the miracle of the life and growth of a plant is beyond my control.

So maybe it is OK if I need to trust the same source of life for myself and for others as I anxiously wait to see the fruit I long for.

Jon Heinly is youth minister for Lancaster (Pa.) Mennonite Conference and Lancaster Mennonite School. He can be reached at jheinly@lancasterconference.org.