My garden continues to teach me.
My green bean plant appears to be thriving, its growth reaching the top of a 6ft trellis. This type of bean is a “pole bean” meant to grab onto its pole with  many runners that produce blooms and then beans. The environment is perfect, the soil, fertile, considering its lush growth. It’s free of weeds too. But…there are NO beans! No beans for our table. No beans for our freezer. No beans to share with people. NO BEANS!!!
This just can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. It has everything it needs and more.
And THAT is the perspective shift. Growth comes largely through our struggle to wait. We come to our ends, wind up on our knees, seek answers and consider change. We put our life in perfect order to  produce fruit. After-all, we have everything within reach, a good church, a faith filled community, the Word in a nano  second on our devices. If we lack anything, it can arrive in 2 Amazon days! 

But wait?? Its a challenge to our overstimulated, over fertilized world. Waiting doesn’t make sense. Yet its a simple and foundational truth. Its where we learn of grace.
In times where fruit lacks , it’s what is needed.
When Paul questioned, God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
2 Cor. 9-10