“Like newborn infants, desire the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow up into your salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We had a hurricane come through our area yesterday. Thankfully, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Perhaps the single biggest challenge was that the family was stuck at home all day and the Internet kept going in and out. For the kids at least, it was like living in the Dark Ages. Maybe the Stone Age. They had to break out an actual DVD in order to watch something on TV. It was rough. As I was out and about some during the day, though, a thought occurred to me that struck me as worth sharing. Maybe not, but I’ll let you decide.

While it rained throughout the day yesterday, most of the rain came in overnight. When I woke up and sat down at our dining room table to write, I looked out the windows into the backyard, and the whole thing was a giant lake. There was standing water everywhere. When I drove to the office all of the ditches and gullies were little swimming pools. The basement level of the church was partially a swimming pool too, but that’s another story.

By midmorning, though, the heaviest rain had moved out of the area. And even though my weather app kept insisting that we were actively getting rain at the clip of almost a third of an inch an hour, we never saw anything of the sort during the day. By the time I got home yesterday afternoon, the lake in our backyard was gone. All of it had soaked in. There wasn’t standing water anywhere that I could see.

This morning, the ground is still plenty soggy. Assuming we don’t get more rain in the next few days, though, things will eventually dry out. If the rain doesn’t start falling again soon, we’ll dry out to the point that we start hurting for water. We’ll complain that we’re not getting enough rain to keep the grass green (well, at least to keep the weeds green in our yard) and the flowers blooming.

That happened earlier this year. We had a really wet winter and early spring. It rained constantly. Mostly it seemed to rain on Sunday mornings when we were having to walk back and forth between buildings. But by late May and into June, the tap turned off and things got dry. Really dry. We were having to go out and water every day just to keep plants alive. The ground was parched.

In all of this, I saw a bit of a parable of our lives. As followers of Jesus, we get our primary nourishment from above. Yes, we have to eat and drink the food and water that comes from the land around us, but those early nutrients aren’t enough to keep us growing and healthy. They’ll sustain us in their own for a bit. They may keep us alive physically, but we won’t grow in the ways that ultimately matter most. We need the spiritual nutrients that come from engaging with God’s word, prayer, the body of Christ, and putting our faith into practice by doing what God says (most notably to make disciples as we grow).

There are seasons when we get a lot of those things. It may just be a particularly rainy season of life (spiritually speaking), but these times often come in the context of a camp experience or a mission trip. Either way, the ground of our lives gets a heaping helping of the water of God’s Spirit. In fact, we get more than we can handle. It runs off into the lives of the people around us. It just sits on the surface where everyone can see it. There’s spiritual water everywhere.

But eventually those times of abundance ease off. The tap seems to turn off and we are left with the watering we have received. Now, at first, this seems okay. The thorough watering we received from some powerful spiritual experience or another gradually soaks in and does us some real good. Spiritual fruit begins to grow and bloom in our lives. We enjoy reaping a rich harvest for a while.

One good watering, though, isn’t enough to sustain us over a long period of time. And after a while, if we don’t actively seek to stay well-watered, we begin to dry out. The flowers that were once healthy and beautiful whither and droop. The fruit stops coming. Our lives become spiritually parched again.

While the times when we receive the equivalent of a spiritual hurricane’s worth of water for our souls are good and can be very productive in terms of producing fruit in us, if all we are doing in life is cycling between seasons of feast or famine, we are probably not going to be very healthy. What we need is consistency over time.

We make an attempt a gardening each year. We’re only ever moderately successful. We used to do really well where we lived before, but then we learned that our garden plot was located over the drain field of our septic system, so that didn’t have nearly as much to do with anything we did in the yard, but that’s a story for another time.

In any event, this year has been one of our most successful years ever with our garden. I think the biggest reason for this is that our youngest took it upon himself to tend it. He regularly talked about caring for “his” garden. He made sure to water it each day when it hadn’t rained in the last 24 hours or so. We’ve never remembered to do that as consistently as he has this year. As a result, everything grew. And even when we went out of town here or there, it didn’t all die while we were gone like it has in the past because the regular nourishment it received made it healthy and strong enough to weather the dry spells.

Our lives are going to have dry spells too. If the only spiritual nourishment we receive is the occasional hurricane, then when those dry spells come, our root systems won’t be deep or strong enough to get us through them with our faith intact. Maybe we won’t lose our faith entirely during those seasons, but it will likely go dormant such that we’ll be starting from scratch every time we finally get a little bit of spiritual water and food again. When you start over from scratch all the time, you don’t ever grow very much. Healthy, sustainable growth that produces fruit over time comes from regular, daily spiritual nourishment.

So then, how are you taking care of your spiritual life? Are you waiting for rainy seasons, or are you giving it the kind of daily attention that will allow God to accomplish the kind of kingdom amazing work in you that He wants to see happen to His glory and your joy? Like Peter said, we need to desire, to long for, to actively seek to come by the kind of spiritual food that will help us grow up into the spiritual men and women God designed us to be. Make sure you eat today. You need it.