Foul Moods and Pumpkin Seeds

One December Sunday in 2021, I was in a funky mood, so I chose to spend the afternoon alone, in my thoughts; and then Jesus wanted to talk about pumpkin seeds…so we talked.

I was preparing some pumpkin seeds for roasting while quietly grumbling that things were not going the way I expected them to, and quite frankly, God, they haven’t gone the way I expected them to in quite some time.

“How many pumpkin seeds are here?” He asked.

“I don’t know, a bunch. But what does that have to do with how things aren’t going as they should be right now,” I fumed.

“Count them.”

I quickly counted the seeds as accurately as I could and reported, “Roughly 250”.

“In two years how many pumpkins are possible from this one pumpkin?”

…each seed represents a pumpkin, that’s 250 pumpkins next year, plant those seeds, if each has about 250 seeds and you plant all of those seeds…250 x 250 = 62,500…that’s a lot of pumpkins from just one pumpkin that was sitting on my steps a few minutes ago…But what does all of this talk about pumpkins have to do with how things are going right now?!

“How many seasons did this pumpkin grow?”, God wanted to know.

“Just one season. The thing is days away from rotting right now.”

Then Jesus filled in the gaps…

This single-season pumpkin has the potential to produce 60,000 pumpkins over the next two years. But if you gauged its value off a single season, it’s not worth much. You can’t determine your value, potential, or impact based on a single season.

It may seem like there’s not much to this “season” or “that season” for that matter, but you can’t count the total impact from just one season…the seed lives on.