Like Cilantro in the Box (Ps. 97:11-12)

Last year I planted some cilantro seed in my big box planter along with many other plants and seeds. Everything I planted came up but the cilantro, and I thought never to see it again, figuring that I overwatered it in learning how to manage the drainage in the box. This year, cilantro (or at least what looks like a version of it) popped up in the box as soon as spring arrived and the weather warmed. I admit am a little afraid to eat it because of the delay, but I don’t really doubt that it is cilantro. It looks like cilantro, smells like cilantro, and came up where I planted cilantro last year. It has been watered and has had access to at least six hours of sunlight daily. Why should I doubt that it is cilantro in the box emerging exactly where I sewed it last summer?

Aren’t we sometimes a bit like the cilantro in the box? God plants a seed deep within us, sows light on the righteousness He has bestowed on us through our belief in Christ; God sets our feet on paths of righteousness. And then adversity hits. The winter season where everything shrivels up, withers, dies down to the visible world, and for all practical purposes looks dead to the naked eye. But underneath the soil, the seed that was sown is waiting for the right conditions to emerge. There is life within the seed regardless of when it emerges for others to see. The date of planting might have been in the midst of a hot season and the conditions are not yet just right for it to emerge and thrive, so it lies dormant, waiting patiently. 

What I see as a failure to thrive is often a time of waiting. It is not, “No!” It is not, “Never!” It is not deadness. I, like that seed waiting to emerge, must rest in His hands and His timing knowing that “light is sewn [like seed] for the righteous and illuminates their path” (Ps. 97:11, AMP). What God has planted and watered will increase when He wants it to increase. Growth will come at His command, not at my wanting or willing it to happen. My job is to dig in to the soil where He has planted me, soaking up all the nutrients of the Word which He has so richly provided, drinking in the Truth found within it. I look upward knowing that what He has sewn in light will one day burst forth in bloom, in “irrepressible joy” that He has spread for the upright in heart (by the way, that comes through Christ, not my feeble efforts) “[who delight in His favor and protection]” (v. 11). 

My job is to wait, rejoicing (not striving with God over my circumstances, whatever they may be). My privilege is to praise His name, giving thanks at every remembrance of what my God has done for me (that I did not, cannot, will never be able to earn). 

As I’ve read through the Psalms this time through, I have seen David in a somewhat different light, more emphasized as the flawed man who recognized God’s work in his own life rather than as the man we often tend to put on a pedestal—the one who has a heart after God’s own. When I see David as a man who understands that the tribulations of this world will come and yet chooses to praise God in spite of his own unworthiness and in light of the worthiness God has granted him, it entirely changes my reading of the Psalms that he wrote. I can then embrace them with the understanding that David gives in Ps. 13, that his soul’s own counsel is sorrowful to his heart (v. 2) because its focus is on his external circumstances and trouble. Contrast this with Ps. 4:7 where David chooses to prayerfully ask for God to put joy in his heart, understanding fully that what God sows in a man’s heart is much better than what man may ever be able to sow in his own. David asks that God sow joy in his broken heart.

Likewise, not focusing on God (read as not sowing intently the Word implanted into my heart) will bring or invite or exaggerate and increase the sorrow in my life. When I focus on my own circumstances, my own plans, my own will, wants, desires, needs, etc., it only increases the negative I am trying to mitigate. When I choose to worship God, to see the sewing of light, to see the eternal potential of the seed that may be yet deeply buried and seemingly dead, I am choosing joy. When I choose to worship Him, the result will always be joyful. I love how the Amplified version reads for Ps. 97:12: “Rejoice in the LORD, you righteous ones [those whose moral and spiritual integrity places them in right standing with God], and praise and give thanks at the remembrance of His holy name.”

When I choose to give thanks wherever I have been placed/planted because of what Christ has done in me regardless of my circumstances in which I find myself, I will be like the cilantro bursting forth suddenly from a place of darkness and reaching for the sky in new growth, fragrant, beautiful, untested but full of potential. Like Christ who came forth from the tomb in resurrection power, God will bring me out of death into life, produce growth in me, and use me for His kingdom. I want to be like the cilantro in the box. 

LORD, sew light and joy in my heart that it will bloom and I may exalt You always.