recreate-clutch

This weekend I attended reCreate, the annual women’s conference held each fall at Church of the Highlands. One of the speaker’s at this year’s conference was Andi Andrew, who founded New York City’s Liberty Church in 2010 with her family. In 2015 she launched the She Is Free Conference.

One of the messages Andi gave this past weekend was all about seeds. So often we pray to God for gifts and we expect instant gratification. But instead of God giving us what we desire, fully grown, God simply gives us the seeds and it’s our job to tend to the soil of our hearts so that the seeds can bear fruit.

God wants us to have a passion for the progress.

These seeds can come in the form of lessons learned at church or at conferences like reCreate or even lessons learned at professional conferences related to writing, blogging, or branding.

Andi warned us to not be seed bag ladies. Do hoard all these seeds, all this knowledge and wisdom you have gained at conferences, webinars, seminars, church, or bible study. Plant the seeds!

cousins-at-recreate
At reCreate16 with my cousin/BFF Tasha

What seeds does God want you to plant this season?

This has been my prayer for the past few days. Andi encouraged us to pray for guidance asking God which seeds we should plant and nourish over the next year. I was stunned when she said this because just before she did I had prayed that exact prayer, asking God what I should focus on between now and next year’s reCreate conference. I want my life to be completely different by next year’s conference.

I must develop a passion for the process.

Don’t compare your seed to someone else’s oak tree, Andi warned us. And then she added, “And maybe the seed God gave you isn’t even for an oak tree!”

Oh how I needed to hear this! I am constantly comparing my bags of seed to the flourishing forests of others and then deriding myself for having the same. And I often play the comparison game with people who aren’t even necessarily doing what I believe I am called to do. How foolish!

But it’s a new day and I believe God has new mercies for me. The weekend of reCreate often feels like New Year’s Eve for me, making today the start of a new year — in my heart at least. I pray that my heart will be good soil producing a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.