Serenity Saint March 18,2023

Growing Your Roots

The person who does the planting or watering isn’t very important, but God is important because he is the one who makes things grow. -1 Corinthians 3:7 (TLB)

Have you ever felt like it was one bad thing after another? No matter what you did, you kept getting the crap end of life's handouts? I believe we all have been there before. We have all probably wondered why this or that was happening to us. I know I did, and I would always ask myself, "Why me?!?" I wasn't a bad person, I didn't con people, I wasn't rude, I'd give you the shirt off my back if you asked, etc.. So why was I always dealing with one problem after another?

It's funny how I thought that drugs were the answer to all my problems. My thought process went something like :"If I take a minute and get my head right then I'll figure it all out." I couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, I think drug use added to my problems. It sure didn't make them go away. I always felt like life was burying me. Like I couldn't keep my head above water and if I did, it wasn't for long.

It wasn't until I got sober and decided to give my life back to God that I started to realize that perhaps I was going thru all my struggles and hardships for a reason. Yes, I will be the first to admit that my choice to live a life of addiction wasn't helping me in life and my choice to use drugs was making life hard. I truly believe that when a person decides to become sober that they need to get rid of all the baggage. Now by baggage I mean to give up all the reasons and excuses you used to justify your reason to get high. Once that happens, you are kind of in a state of 'rawness', as I like to refer to it as. In this state, I started to realize and understand that God was perhaps using all my struggles and hardships as a way of planting seeds to help grow me into the person I was meant to be.

God plants seeds to bring forth fruit. "He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful." - John 15:2. That would be extremely pointless to plant something that would never produce anything good, right? We plant seeds for them to be fruitful. In order for the seeds to be fruitful its gonna have to be buried under soil and have to be rained on in order for it to sprout from the thick layers of soil in which it was buried under. Once it breaks thru the ground, you start to smile because you see that it is becoming what you meant for it to become. What you planted it for.

A friend of mine once told me that my track record for overcoming bad days was 100%. That everything life has thrown at me had not defeated me. God doesn't put more on you than you can bear. I believe that it is thru our trials and our tribulations that help build our faith and our strength. So the next time you feel like life is burying you alive, try to look at it as though you are being planted for the harvest.