Tara is a little girl sent to spend time with her grandfather, a farmer. She enjoys her summer running around the property as well as playing with the piglets and chickens.
Her grandfather takes her out to the field and shows her how to plant a flower seed just the right depth into the earth. She's about to dump too much water from her watering can when he stops her, teaching her not to flood it out.
Every day, she runs out to that patch of ground where she planted her seed. She waters it just enough and tells it to grow with a smile. As time goes by, however, she's disappointed that nothing has shown up. Summer is coming to an end and she is yet to see her seed grow into a pretty flower as her grandfather promised.
One afternoon, a man walks up to the fence and waves her over. She doesn't go too close, he's a stranger after all, but she answers his questions thinking he must be a friend of her grandfather's. The man asks if she's planted anything and she tells him about the seed she's waiting on. He produces a beautiful flower. He tells her to dig up the seed and put the flower there instead.
Little Tara is excited! Finally, she'll have a flower with colorful, red petals! She races out to the field and digs up what she planted. She discovers a shoot with roots but it didn't have flowers yet. In its place, she sticks in her new flower, smiles and skips off to go feed the chickens.
The flower is wilting by the next morning, so she waters it. Two days later, it's dead. She drags her grandfather to show him what happened but he's confused. Through tears, she eventually tells him what happened and he shakes his head with a sad sigh.
He explains that she never should have pulled up what she planted because it only had a few days left to shoot up past the dirt. It would have displayed lovely blue flowers that she could have taken home to her mother. Poor Tara wails as he comforts her.
More often than not, you and I are that little child. We sow a seed of prayer in faith but because we don't see any evidence of it, we effectively dig it up. Our impatience makes us subject to the devil's lie that there's a pre-grown flower we can have, instead of waiting for what we've sown to grow.
When we uproot our prayers, we're sadly left with nothing to show for our efforts, just like in Tara's situation. The prayers we planted 'die' and the counterfeit we believed in evaporates.
May the good Lord help us whereby we grow in patience and wisdom. May we remember our prayers, wait on them to be fulfilled, and not accept satan's deception that there is an alternative to waiting on God, IJMN Amen.
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