Prosper where you are planted.

The number of times I’ve killed a succulent would truly blow your mind.  No matter where I put them in the house, they grow lanky, reaching for more sunlight (an asset of tremendous deficit when surrounded by trees).  So much for them being “cactus like” and supposedly, therefore, easier to grow!

The pots are tiny, so they dry out faster than a kitchen sponge, and I’d have to use a mere thimble to water them if the intension was not a full blown washout followed by a flat, water logged, rather slimy green something on a little brown pot the next morning.  My poor husband, bless his heart, is forever trying to revive my very unhappy little plants.  I kid you not, succulents are a permanent line item on the Trader Joe’s list, since I seem to blow through them faster than a bag of tortilla chips!

All except one.  One jobbie keeps growing and growing, shooting offspring succulents from the sides of the main stalks like a firecracker gone ballistic!  And he doesn’t even get much light where he lives, on the bottom wrung of a small shelf!  He’s not just growing, he’s thriving!  

The difference?  He’s got a bigger pot and the right kind of soil.

Likewise, if I grow my tomatoes along the back fence… nothing.  Notta.  Zilch save for blight and wasted soil.  The side of the house?  I’m no longer surprised when they reach 10 feet tall and can’t support themselves under the weight of all the fruit!  I really have to work at my succulents, and my veggie garden with all the disease and pests in Virginia.  But if you asked me to grow blackberries, “creeper”, or honeysuckle, you’d have to prune them with a bush hog!  These are all native to Virginia.  Succulents?  Definitely not.

You see, when God plants something somewhere, He really knows what He’s doing.  He knows all the conditions needed to allow whatever form of life it is to flourish, and ensures that those conditions are attainable.  A seed planted in damp cold soil won’t germinate.  Chipmunks don’t live in the Arctic.  Sunflowers need, well, sun.  They won’t grow in a cave.  

God designed all living things to grow only where He knows they can survive, and thrive. You may not like the thistles growing in the front yard you work so hard to keep manicured.  But, to be honest, they wouldn’t grow roots that penetrate down to the opposite hemisphere if the growing conditions weren’t optimal.  

How do you kill a thistle quickly? Make the conditions not optimal of course!  Spray it with poison… certainly not optimal for a thistle.

Salt on a slug?  Definitely not optimal.  

Gerbera daisies planted in the shade?  Not gonna work. 

And this applies to where God has planted you in life as well- in a city or the country, married or single, loving your job or dragging yourself to work each day with a double espresso in hand.  

Where you are planted is part you and part God.  

Let me explain.

Naturally you make decisions each day that guide and shape your life story.  You may choose classes to take in college if you attend, decide to start a business, or have children.  But behind this “part you” part, is also God.  He overseas every part of your life… the successes and the failures, the peaks and the valleys, the health and the sickness, the yes’s and the no’s.  He knows exactly what you are going through, where you have been, and what lies ahead.

So, basically, you have been planted where God wants you to grow, bloom, and thrive. And He ensures that all the necessary conditions to do all three are available.  But here’s where He allows for us to get involved…

Fortunately for the weeds and Spring bunnies, the conditions and opportunities around them are instinctive, and determined very much by their environment, without their interference.  

Have you ever noticed a dandelion growing in a crack in the concrete?  A sidewalk doesn’t seem at first pass to be an optimal place for a little plant to grow.  And yet they often do miraculously, irritatingly well.  They don’t need fertilizer, or special potting soil.  They weather the elements just fine, and multiply by the thousands with a single breeze blowing the seeds off the stem.  They don’t question where they landed when they, too, were once only a tiny feathery seed.  They simply do their very best, right where they are planted.

But we humans have brains.  We have souls.  We have free will.  Meant to exist in communication with God, our lives are a dance between the provisions, opportunities and gifts God places around us and our awareness and desire to utilize them wisely.

Often we are so focused on the “if only’s” and the “someday’s”, or the “I wish, but’s”, and keep our sight set only on our manufactured, yet unattainable ideals for our lives. We fail to nurture ourselves right where we’ve been planted.  

During the many years of my journey through anorexia and bulimia I lived very much in a dream world.  It was a world of planning, wishing, day dreaming, and… complaining.  Was life hard?  Unbelievably so.  Was it discouraging and painful?  Beyond compare.  Was I lonely?  Yes, terribly and to the point of daily pillow-soaking tears.

Yet by focusing on these recognitions, my hope lay not in God’s sovereignty and strength, nor even my own!  Nor did it lay in His promises to provide and take care of my future, or decree that He had formed me, knew me, and had brought me to the furnace I needed to walk through, Him by my side.

Instead my hope lay in the future- in a “perfect environment” with “optimal support”, following the still-undetermined “ideal meal plan”, and with the “most fulfilling career”.  (Maybe with a friend or two, no pain, and possibly a family of my own, if I’m to paint you an accurate painting of my “I’ll do this if and when” wishlist.)

I have wanted for years to live close to my folks in the mountains of North Carolina.  I was still holding on to a career that I had decided was not “me”, 14 years prior!  My husband had a job that forced him to live hours away during the week leaving me by myself.  I wanted a family, but my illness had made that not possible.  And in 2018 my central nervous system crashed, leaving me with constant, unrelenting tingling in my feet and an ankle sprain that wouldn’t heal.

Desperately I tried frantically to change my life.  I searched for hours day after day for real estate closer to family.  I scoured the internet for jobs for my husband (even though I don’t understand anything about his field of work).  I went through interviews, one after another unsuccessful, trying to find a recovery coach to work with who was a good match for me.  And I searched university course catalogues in attempt to find a subject matter enticing enough to pursue a degree in- the trajectory which I believed to be the ticket to changing career trains.

And in the meantime, I struggled day in and day out with anorexia and bulimia, not even putting up a fight.  Amazing isn’t it?  I was that resigned to the chains that bound me, and my focus was anywhere else but on me or on God. We are raised to optimize our circumstances, work to make things better, run from things that are hard, and protect our feelings of safety and comfort at all cost. So I was doing what logically made sense- change the environment and life, then I will heal and life will be better.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that if God plants you somewhere, the conditions will all be nice and easy.  This is far from the truth.  In my post Tension Is Meant To Move You, I remind my readers that often times God has to take us through trials and tough times in order to finish His good work in us.  But He also allows tribulations to complete His good work through us.

Take Joseph for example. He was wrongfully thrown into prison after having done nothing wrong, and making only righteous, God- pleasing decisions, which is more than most of us can say! Though he had earned great favor with Potiphar, he was falsely accused by Potiphar's wife, Iempsar, of trying to violate her, after her attempts at seduction had failed.

“But the Lord was with Joseph in the prison and showed him his faithful love. And the Lord made Joseph a favorite with the prison warden. Before long, the warden put Joseph in charge of all the other prisoners and over everything that happened in the prison. The warden had no more worries, because Joseph took care of everything. The Lord was with him and caused everything he did to succeed.” Genesis 39:19-23

And then there is Paul. The letters of Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon were written by Paul from the confinement of prison, and yet they offer hope through expressing some of the most liberating concepts imaginable. Centuries later we draw on his writings, penned from deep sorrow and grief, to comfort us, guide us, and encourage us.

Without rain, the dandelion cannot grow so beautifully in that crack in the asphalt. If we never survive the chill of winter, the arrival of Spring is less sweet.  If we are not confronted with our shortcomings, we never understand the power of God and His trustworthiness.  

God loves us so much that on occasion He must actually allow our stumbling.  But He will only allow this if He knows that, through the storms, we will be able to flourish even better on the other side, and His work will be perfected through the suffering. Wherever He has planted you for this chapter of life, it is not by mistake, and you have everything you need to be more than conquerors.  (Romans 8:37)

If Paul was here today, he’d likely ask you “What are you waiting for? Get going!” You have all you need.  Don’t simply grow where you are planted.  And don’t simply bloom where you are planted.  Prosper where you are planted.

P.s. It’s fine to talk to God about your problems, but remember to talk to your problems about God too!