DON’T KNOW HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT winter. You may think that snow, icy ponds good enough for hockey, and hoarfrost sugar-coating the trees are among the most glorious things on earth.

Or you may not.

I like winter. I even like it a lot. In fact, there’s one thing that I especially like about the winter months: Nobody asks me about my garden. They don’t ask me if I’m going to plant one; or, if I have planted one, what it’s growing or when things will be ripe.

My terrible confession is this: I hate gardening. But even though I’ve confessed not to having a green thumb when it comes to cultivating things in the earth, I’ve thought a lot about a variety of horticultural issues surrounding the planting and growth of radishes and pumpkins.

I should start by confessing that my dislike of gardening is not because of any sort of disinterest or lack of effort by my mother. She truly loved gardening. She loved planting, she loved weeding, and she loved picking vegetables. Her father, my grandpa, was exactly the same way.

So they, along with my dad, tried to pass it on to me, too. I planted. I weeded. I picked vegetables. I once, rather memorably, spent an extremely hot Sunday afternoon unloading a pickup full of fresh chicken manure to be used as fertilizer in our garden out behind the barn. But none of that, even apart from that particularly fragrant pickup load, impressed me in a way that it has become a lifelong habit.

Even with a limited career in gardening—and you know this if you’ve spent any significant time in a garden—you learn at least a few things. And some of those things I learned were things that have to do with Christian education, with what happens in the lives of students on our university and college campuses.

I learned some lessons as I grew radishes. I discovered that they simply required a straight row, a shallow trench in the dirt, a sprinkling of small seeds down that trench, and in almost no time, with hardly any weeding or anything, you had radishes ready to pick. I found that they offered quick, easy proof of my labors.

Pumpkins, on the other hand, were a different matter. You planted only a few seeds at a time. They were planted by hills instead of rows, and it seemed as though it would take forever for them to grow. You would wait and wait and wait, and even though you’d get a lot of leaves early on in the season, the pumpkins would be eternal in coming. I’d find that they would first appear green and round and small. It wouldn’t be until the very end of the growing season that they’d become plump, orange, and ready to pick.

I’ve thought about all of that as I have worked in Christian higher education. It may not be immediately obvious what radishes and pumpkins have to do with the task of Christian higher education, but let me explain.

Gardens and Students
To begin, Adventist education has been about the land and gardens and farms from its very beginning. Our forefathers and foremothers were convinced that education couldn’t be reduced to simple book learning, but had to be balanced; it had to focus aggressively on mind, body, and spirit.

All of those often came together in forceful ways in the gardens and farms that surrounded our very first Adventist schools. And the students who attended not only grew up on farms, but also literally studied on farms that doubled as academies and colleges. In those days our students spent their time surrounded by the powerful lessons of growth and nature. Every aspect of the students’ lives was strengthened as

these students saw resonance in the way things grew or did not grow, and realized what that meant not only for an immediate physical harvest but also for the life of the Christian.

In fact, these students were clearly experiencing a legacy that you find throughout the Bible, in which gardens, plants, harvest, rain, fruit, weeds, and wilting are all powerful motifs for God and the closeness (or, at unfortunate times, the distance) of His relationship with us. The Bible starts in a garden and ends in an eternal garden where a tree growing by a river is a powerful symbol of God’s promise to us as Christians. Also, the failure of gardens in the Bible, from Eden through the parables of the New Testament, serve notice to what the world—and our lives—are like when God is not present.

As a result, the work of God and Christ and the Holy Spirit is often described in the context of planting seeds, and we as Christians and as educators are all called to do the same: not only to plant, but also to cultivate and harvest.

Today many of our schools are not immersed in farm work. Even so, the work of gardening continues. For example, Christian education literally and powerfully begins as we plant seeds of Christ in each student’s life. As each student sits in a class, as each student hears a lecture, as each studies, even as each (we hope) sees Christ portrayed in the lives of teachers and staff—all this is part of the daily seedplanting in students’ lives.

This is critical. For our students to mature as Christians, these seeds of God’s Word, of God’s leading, are required. Belief, a changed life, Christianity itself must take root and grow within each individual.

Calls for Care and Patience
But as we observe this process of growth within students, we realize that is not always an instant process. That’s why the Bible also often talks about sunshine. About having deep enough soil. About guarding against the danger of predators.

In fact, in the story of the sower, one of Christ’s most familiar parables, there are four kinds of seed plantings described. Even though we often look to this parable to talk about the failure of gardens, there is in three of these cases at least some kind of growth.

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold” (Mark 4:3-8, NRSV).

As we read this familiar story we’re reminded that Christian education can’t stop simply with planting seeds. It must also be concerned with feeding, with carefully cultivating our students, cultivating the plants that grow up in Christ all about us. I believe this cultivation comes through prayer, through the lives led by our faculty, staff, and administration on our campuses, and in the way we interact with each other. But part of that also comes directly from God.

Ellen White talks about this process. “Man has his part to act in promoting the growth of the grain,” she says, “but there is a point beyond which he can accomplish nothing. He must depend upon One who has connected the sowing and the reaping by wonderful links of his own omnipotent power” (Education, p. 104).

God’s role in the growth of plants in our midst is also described this way: “He will also send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes from the land will be rich and plentiful” (Isa. 30:23, NIV).

The potential we see for growth in our students is often pretty exciting. But again, it doesn’t always happen overnight. And, sadly, it hardly ever seems perfect.

This is often the most significant challenge of Adventist education. While we set about the work of planting and cultivating, what we often find ourselves most interested in is not the growth of the plant but the harvest. We want results. Specifically, we’re most interested in spiritual results. But those are often personal, often difficult to measure.

In fact, how do we measure spiritual results? When a student completes a program at one of our schools and graduates? When a student is baptized? When a student decides to tell someone else that they believe in God? Those are hard things, because often what we’re talking about when we talk about spiritual growth is something that happens within a student’s heart. Something that happens directly between that student and God.

So instead we search for easier clues: Does the student attend worships and church regularly? Do they go out on singing bands? What color is their hair? Do they have more holes in their head than God originally blessed them with?

It’s those issues that seem most important as we reflect on the idea of the harvest within our schools, as we talk about whether we find radishes or pumpkins among our students. And when we do find them, what does it really mean?

Sometimes We Wish All Were Radishes
Those of us who are the parents, church members, board members, faculty, staff, and administrators that surround our Adventist schools often wish only for radishes. We want to plant seeds in straight rows, and we want those seeds to mature quickly and noticeably. We want measurable results, and the radishes in our student bodies often supply just that. They are the kids who work at summer camps, who spend a year as a student missionary, who spend Halloween night collecting food for others instead of candy for themselves.

But it’s frequently painful to observe that not every student is like that. We know that as we look at students in our Adventist schools it often breaks our hearts. We look at the hill where we planted our small handful of seeds, and we sometimes see no growth at all. Sometimes we see only struggling plants. Sometimes we see a plant that is full of leaves but no fruit. Or if we do see fruit there, it is incomplete, still small and green when it should be big and orange.

But here at the heart of the greatest challenge of Christian education—our students who do not mature as we wish, dream, hope, or pray—we also find the greatest beauty, the greatest possibility, the greatest hope.

Ellen White writes about this kind of student: “For a time the good seed may lie unnoticed in the heart, giving no evidence that it has taken root” (ibid., p. 105).

This passage from the book Education identifies exactly where our own hearts often ache within us. This phase of a student’s life where there is no evidence of Christ taking root, no evidence of growth. The stage where sometimes all you see is the smooth, unruffled surface of dirt.

But Ellen White goes on to describe how these students are the pumpkins in our midst. She says that “afterward, as the Spirit of God breathes on the soul, the hidden seed springs up, and at last brings forth fruit. In our lifework we know not which shall prosper, this or that. This question it is not for us to settle” (ibid.).

That’s incredible hope we need to keep in mind as we face the pumpkins among our students. The wilting plants. The seeds that fall on rocks. The seeds that are frequently set upon by the crows of wrong influences and temptation.

In fact, I believe we are called to look at these very students and detect promise, not despair; hope, not failure. We are called to look at these students as a promise that’s not yet realized. Ellen White reminds us that we need to look on with a patience that doesn’t even require that we ourselves see results. Instead, we simply need to kneel about these students, our knees and fingernails dirt-stained, working patiently, carefully, as we encourage, as we pray for these pumpkins to grow.

Once again, whether we’re talking about our schools, our churches, or the world around us, we find that even though we humanly wish again and again for radishes in these gardens that surround us, we’ll often find ourselves surrounded by pumpkins.

Even so, it’s within the pumpkins that grow that we can sometimes discover the most powerful evidence of Christ’s work on this earth, the most amazing proof of how God changes lives in our schools.

These pumpkins in our midst consistently remind us that the plants we dream of may not simply mature after several years of family worship. They may not mature after an evangelistic series. They may not mature after three or four years of academy or college.

But there is this. If we have prayed over and cultivated the seeds that are planted in each of these students’ lives, in our children’s lives, in the lives of our church members, in our churches, and in our institutions, we have the promise of maturity, of harvest, of the cycle beginning all over again. God reminds Isaiah that the harvest is not just bread but also more seeds, saying: “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10, 11, NIV).

It’s simple. And amazing. The harvest isn’t just about reaping, about making bread, about surveying the results of our labors—it’s also about beginning again, about planting more seeds. With time, each one of our students who is transformed by Christian education has the potential to begin planting seeds of their own.

In fact, if you’ve ever made a pumpkin pie from scratch, if you’ve ever plunged ice-cream scoops and tablespoons and sometimes even your hands deep into the heart of a ripe pumpkin, you know that pumpkins are not only big and round and orange, but also consistently filled with an immense number of seeds. They’re lush with the promise of the next sowing, and with that sowing, the promise of yet another harvest.

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Stephen Payne is vice president for enrollment management at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.