Ever-increasing Fruitfulness

During a recent bout with discouragement, I got to wondering why I never seem to “arrive” at my calling in life. I run toward the picture I have of it but, just as I feel like I’m getting there, its image becomes hazy and drifts from my grasp.

I can be breathless with excitement about my destiny one moment—reaching with trembling fingers to caress its outline—and devastated the next as those same fingers close over a dissolving image.

I know God has a grand design in mind for me, but why can’t I seem to get there? Oswald Chambers wrote, in My Utmost for His Highest, that God’s purpose in creating us wasn’t to develop us into our most perfect selves, but into His most perfect likeness. “It is not that God makes us beautifully rounded grapes,” he commented, “but that He squeezes the sweetness out of us.”

That’s it, I think. I keep expecting to see my abilities peak in perfection, my goals all finally realized, my plans totally completed. I can be sparkling with the dew of success one moment, plump with expertise and on my way to nicely rounded status. The next minute, I feel plucked from the vine, all used up and drained of vision. I’m disappointed at not being a fully mature grape.

So, what’s happening?

God gradually unfolds the revelation of His purpose for us. He “sets” our fruit with a partial vision of what’s to come—an image of our call originating in our hearts and pollinated by the input of others. The fruit of that vision grows and develops until the Vinedresser decides it’s time to draw from it. He picks the fruit from His vine as He sees fit, even when we feel we’re not ready to give it.

Whether the goodness He’s grown in us seems to drip easily from us or it feels as though He’s squeezed it from us, we can feel emptied out with the giving. Yet we aren’t done nor truly empty because the Husbandman is always setting fresh fruit.

It can feel like a start-over, a back-to-kindergarten. We’re suddenly restless again to see ourselves mature and productive. God is just setting new fruit in us—similar to what came before yet somehow different and more refined. This new grape—this fresh version of vision—will probably not reach its fully rounded status either before God calls for its goodness to spill out.

Again and again, God sets fresh fruit in our hearts to bring something bigger, better, fuller from our lives into the world.

Are you discouraged you still don’t see the full ripening of your purpose? Be at peace. God will produce in us, grape by grape, ever richer wine to satisfy the thirst of the world. Allow the restlessness within you fuel an ever-increasing (but never quite finished) fruitfulness for Him.

What about you? Do you struggle with feeling like you’re never quite finished? How do you deal with that?