Today’s Podcast
Today’s Bible reading plan:
Read it in a year – Ecclesiastes 9-10
see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)
Today’s Devotional
Luke 13:6-9
Jesus: (following up with this parable) A man has a fig tree planted in his vineyard. One day he comes out looking for fruit on it, but there are no figs. He says to the vineyard keeper, “Look at this tree. For three years, I’ve come hoping to find some fresh figs, but what do I find? Nothing. So just go ahead and cut it down. Why waste the space with a fruitless tree?”
The vineyard keeper replies, “Give it another chance, sir. Give me one more year working with it. I’ll cultivate the soil and heap on some manure to fertilize it. If it surprises us and bears fruit next year, that will be great, but if not, then we’ll cut it down.”
What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?
I remember as a lieutenant, one soldier in my platoon that just couldn’t do anything right. I’m not sure how he made it out of basic training and certainly couldn’t understand how he got through his medical training to become a medic. But there he was in my platoon formation every morning filling one of the slots and as short as we were of personnel at the time, I had to figure out how to use him or get him better trained to do the missions we needed to cover to take care of the soldiers in the battalion my platoon served.
After he had been there for about three months and doing everything I knew to do to try and teach this kid how to do his job, I’d just about given up. Everything I tried backfired. None of the companies we supported wanted him as part of the team when it came to their medical support. He just couldn’t do anything right and was a lot more of a hindrance than a help when it came time to go to the field and train.
I was ready to do the paperwork to send him home before he hit that magic timeline to get him all the benefits as a veteran and just let him go when my platoon sergeant came to me. It was a lot like the story of the fig tree. He asked me to give him one more month to work with this soldier and see if he could turn him around. It would still fit within that probationary timeline before he received full VA benefits and I agreed.
I don’t know what my platoon sergeant said or did with that soldier, but a minor miracle occurred in that month. Something woke up in his brain and he suddenly started understanding his role and responsibilities as a soldier-medic in a deployable infantry battalion. He understood that the lives of those infantrymen he went to the field to support were in his hands as they trained and maneuvered in some fairly risky environments. And he became one of my best medics in the rest of my time as platoon leader in that organization.
I learned a lesson from that soldier and from that platoon sergeant that carried across in both my professional and spiritual life. I’ve tried not just write people off. I think we are often too quick to do that sometimes. We assume people are unsalvageable and quit on them. We give up trying and consequently lose out on an opportunity to gain a good employee, win a good friend, or bring another person to Jesus.
We forget that some people just aren’t ready to accept what we have to teach them or tell them and need time to think things through. Few parents today know that a hundred years ago, formal education, reading, writing, math, didn’t start until kids were 8 or 9 years old. The thought was their brains weren’t ready for them to sit in a class all day and absorb the information. A kid’s role in life was to play, learn to get along with other people, begin to form their basis for moral and ethical values through their interaction with other kids and adults. Their job was to play, not go to school. So maybe those kids that don’t get it in first and second grade today aren’t slow or behind or learning disabled. Maybe they are right on target and we just miss the boat in how we try to educate our kids. We need to give them another chance and remember that we are not all alike.
And maybe that son or daughter that you’ve been praying for or that neighbor that you know needs God or that co-worker that seems so abrasive just needs a little more nurturing in God’s love to have that eureka moment when it all comes together and suddenly the lights come on. In our instant gratification world, we want everything to happen right now. That’s not how things usually work in nature. Often it’s not how God works things out for us in our spiritual journey, either.
So when you have that urgent prayer need, that loved one that really needs God and you’ve been praying your heart out for them. Don’t give up. Remember the story of the fig tree and the caretaker. Give it a little longer with extra effort and extra care and see what happens. You never know what God will do in that time. You might be surprised at the results.
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