A little over three years ago my dear wife decided we needed a lemon tree.  Cool idea, I thought.  I like lemons.  Makes my water taste better.  Makes my tea taste better.  Have many other useful purposes, lemons do.  So we planted the lemon tree in our backyard.

 

That Spring we saw some small little buds producing what looked like very green, small lemons.  But they didn’t get very big at all and fell off rather quickly.  Not exactly what I was hoping for, to say the least.

 

Turns out lemon trees, we were told, take three to five years of growth before they really start producing fruit.

 

Reminds me of how the Christian life can be.  We can get impatient and wonder why we are not producing much fruit.  But God sometimes designs things so that we have to wait.  We need to get some good roots below the surface to make sure that we will be strong and well-grounded.  We need to get big enough to be able to bear the weight of the fruit that will hang from our branches.  We need to develop patience so that we allow the fruit to hang long enough to mature and not fall off prematurely.  God clearly has his reasons for delaying the joy of beautiful, ripe, abundant fruit.

 

Our lemon tree appears to be growing some really attractive lemons this year.  I can hardly wait to pick them and eat them!  But I’ve waited a few years.  I can wait a little longer.