God and green beans

Like many of you, I was raised in church. Actually, I was raised in a series of churches. Mostly my family was Methodist, but I went to an Episcopalian nursery school and a Mennonite Bible school. During the summer, when we didn’t sing in our church’s choir, my dad often took us to different churches: Presbyterian, Lutheran, Quaker, Baptist, whatever. We married in the Lutheran church. For a while there, I was a “Jesus freak” and attended some Pentecostal churches. Gradually, though, I stopped going to church much at all. And unfed, my faith withered.

So I became an agnostic. And I discovered over a period of years that this left me with a gaping hole in my life. I tried various routes to fill it, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, I decided to reexamine the idea of God.

My approach wasn’t really a conventional one. I was open to the idea that God existed, and I was every bit as open to the idea that he wasn’t. I spent a good deal of time thinking about God, though, and about what he might be like. And in my lame-brained way, I chose a rather peculiar method of deciding the “God issue”: I wrote a job description for God.

In other words, IF he existed, what would he be like? And could I find any evidence to support this? And if so, was he something I wanted to allow in my life?

Quite a few years have passed since I came up with this cock-eyed idea, and I’ve developed JUST enough humility by now to realize that I was an extremely pompous and arrogant bit of fluff for coming up with this approach. But let me tell you how patient God was with me.

You see, once I decided that I’d found enough evidence to believe he existed, I next decided to see if I wanted to include him in my life. I could accept the existence of God, but did he meet my standards? (After all, I was pretty special stuff, right?) I spent days pondering along these lines, often working in our little garden as I did so.

We had adopted a method of vegetable gardening called “square foot gardening”, which seemed to make very efficient use of a relatively small amount of garden space. And one day, as I continued to meditate on “the God problem”, I started picking green beans from our garden.

Remember, this was a very small space, but I soon filled a bucket, which I carried in to the house and placed in one side of our double sink. I went back outside and continued picking green beans. Another bucket was filled and, once again, I dumped it into the double sink. This happened several times, until finally both sides of the sink were full to overflowing. And my bucket was full. And I still had more to pick.

And suddenly the light dawned for me in these rather ineloquent words:

Sue, if you think you’re such hot ****, go ahead and make just ONE bean.


And thus a door was opened in my soul, and God came in.



As I look back, my arrogance astonishes me… and the grace and patience of God amazes me even more. What a wonderful God we have! Not only did he tolerate my highfalutin attitude, but he rushed in to fill the void I’d shut him out of for so long!


I’d like to hear your story. Did you wander far from God at one time? Did you doubt? Were there times when you didn’t believe, or when you were too stubborn to allow God’s grace into your life? And what changed for you? How did you arrive at a different understanding?


Will you share your story?