The Shallow Bed And The Good Tomatoes

The tomatoes in that garden are good every year and everybody says so.

They are in a raised bed her husband built out of scaffold boards a long time ago, and it is, if you actually measure it, about nine inches deep. Nine inches of good compost sitting on top of a patio.

They do fine. They have always done fine. She feeds them and waters them and they give her more than she can use.

Here is what a man who grows things for a living said to her at a gate one afternoon, entirely kindly, and she has not been able to shake it.

He said, those are very good tomatoes for a bed that shallow. Imagine what they would do in the ground.

Now here is the other thing, and the tomatoes are only the picture.

Her children are grown and they ask her things. Real things. The sort of question a person only asks their mother, usually at eleven at night in a kitchen with a cup they are not drinking.

And she has noticed that whatever the question is, she answers it out of the same three things.

Three things she worked out in her thirties. They are true, and they are good, and they have got her and several other people through a great deal.

But they are three, and she is sixty one, and she cannot remember the last time she went further down than them.

Nobody has ever complained. Her children think she is wise. That is somehow the part that bothers her.

If you have been answering out of a shallow bed, come and sit at this table. Nobody is going to hand you a scheme.

Every verb in that sentence is still running

Paul writes a line to a church he had never visited, and he stacks four pictures on top of each other, and not one of them has a full stop in it.

Rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.Colossians 2:7

Rooted. Built up. Established. Abounding.

Look at who he is describing. Not new believers. Not people in trouble. People who were already taught, already settled, already the sort of person other people came to. And what he says about them is that the building is still going on.

Which means Paul did not think anybody's depth was finished at a certain age, and he certainly did not think it was finished in your thirties.

You are not past the growing part, and there is no age in this where the building stops. Colossians 2:7 keeps every one of those verbs open ended, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the building rather than your appetite, so sixty one is not a lid and it was never meant to become one.

Shallow is about the bed, not about the gardener

Now let me say the thing that needs saying before you do the two things people do with this.

The first is to decide that the last thirty years were a fraud. They were not. Those three things are true, they have carried people, and the fact that they have held that long says something good about how carefully you worked them out at the time. Nobody is calling your thirties shallow and nobody is calling anything wasted.

The second is to go and get a system. This site does not hand anybody a scheme and I am not about to start.

The man at the gate did not say the tomatoes were bad. He said they were very good, in nine inches, and then he asked a question about the ground.

That is the whole of what is on offer here, and it is a question rather than a correction.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 92:14 says they still bear fruit in old age and stay fresh and green, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that in a person, which means nothing about your years is a ceiling on what you can take in.

Here is the actual move, and it is smaller than you are braced for. Not more study. Slower study.

In your thirties you worked those three things out because you needed them, which means you went at them slowly, out loud, over weeks, going back over a line twice because it had caught on something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a woman checks a page she already knows the answer on.

You have not run out and there is nothing here that stopped working. Isaiah 55:11 says His word does not return empty but accomplishes what He purposes, and it is His Spirit who carries it in, which is why a passage you have used for thirty years can go a foot deeper tonight without anybody starting anything.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you, and the bed was always allowed to get deeper.