As a gardener, nothing is more rewarding to me than reaping the benefits of my labor whether that is a lovely bouquet of flowers, or the bounty of my fruit and vegetable gardens. When the soil, sun, and rain are just right everything grows, blooms, and produces a bountiful harvest. But, of course, not everything is just right.

Morning glory belongs to a family of unique and tenacious plants. While offering beautiful white or purple blossoms, that beauty belies a more pernicious and tenacious nature to spread and take over one’s entire yard! Morning glory is a variety of bindweed, which grows from rhizomes—underground storage structures that promote the spread of the weed. Hardy, tenacious, and opportunistic, the morning glory will spread in such ways that it will destroy every square inch of the garden.

Battling this plant nemesis in my own gardens has given me a new understanding for the process involved in the cultivation and preservation of gardens. Digging deep to get up as many of the rhizomes as possible takes commitment, hard work, and a great deal of time. Often, I look out over garden beds cleared of any visible evidence of morning glory after my labor, only to look out the next day and see new shoots where I had just cleared them.

With all of this back-breaking labor, it is easy to be tempted towards finding an easier way: A rock garden, perhaps, instead of a green one? Why in the world would anyone be attracted to the inconvenience of going out and working long hours in the hot sun battling insects, weeds, and other pests for a garden? Why would I slave in the summer sun for beauty or for bounty?

When I labor over my garden, or any project for that matter, I am connected to a larger process, and not just an end result. It was my knees that began to ache from bending over, my hands that occasionally encountered a stinging or biting insect of one kind or another, my muscles that would cramp my fingers and hands from relentless weeding and digging. Yet, taking notice of this process makes me aware of my own tendency to desire convenience or to want to give up when things become difficult. Just as one might take for granted the process that goes into getting good food on filled grocery shelves, I often want for the shortcut or the expedience. Working hard to create conditions that enhance thriving for my flowers and vegetables in my own garden connects me to a part of the process that is done on my behalf on a much larger scale. I think of all the people who labor on my behalf so that I might enjoy the wonderful food on my grocery shelves. Going out and doing battle for my own garden reminds me that the process is just as important as the end product.

In many other regards, our busyness and commitment to convenience often keep us from engaging in vital processes that inform us of our beginning and guide us to our end, just as they contribute to a general amnesia about what it takes to put food on our tables. Our consumer conveniences often sever us from vital connections; we forget from whence we have come and where we are going. We look for the quick fix or the shortcut to the end goal, rather than journeying through many arduous processes essential to our growth and development as human persons.

How similarly people of faith often wish for the easy way or the convenience of a ‘seven-step plan’ for spiritual growth. Jesus’s frequent use of agricultural imagery should not surprise us. Some of the most beloved images from Jesus’s conversations with his disciples evoke the vine and branches from grapevines and vineyards that likely filled the landscape. Growing grapes requires a long process. It takes three years to establish a grape planting. Yet, even during the third season, only a limited harvest may be expected from the vines. The first full crop normally takes between four to five years.

Perhaps this knowledge can give new insight into the words of Jesus:

I am the vine; you are the branches…Remain in me, and I will remain in you…no branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine…remain in my love…I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.(3)

The spiritual life, like our development as human beings, is about the process. Just as in farming, much of that process involves watching and waiting, tilling and cultivating the land, even having to persevere and dig deep to pull out yet another encroaching rhizome. There are no short cuts for a bountiful harvest.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) “Every Piece of Fruit” cited in Alice Peck Ed., Bread, Body, Spirit (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2008).

(2) John 15:4-16.