On Display

I wrote recently about gardening and how you should not dig seeds up to see how they are doing and that you should not treat new Christians in that way either. I remembered something from my childhood which also illustrates this in a more radical way.  In the Spring we used to get a jam jar and line it with blotting paper and put water in and then push a runner bean bean between the glass and the blotting paper. (For those who don't know, blotting paper is paper which absorbs liquid and holds on to it.  It was used to blot handwriting written with wet ink, it absorbed the excess ink quickly without causing a mess, so that you could immediately close the exercise book.) The bean in the jar would begin to germinate and send roots down to the water, splitting the bean open.  There followed a shoot going upwards which quickly turned green. This was all very fine for children to see the wonder of new life developing but the poor old bean was usually discarded.  If it was thrown on the compost heap it probably had a chance of life.  In many ways when God is working in someone's life we need to hold back, the process is none of our business.  We should not make the new christian feel they are on display and watched at every moment, as if in a glass jar, for them to "do the right thing." New growth requires privacy.