Growing Potatoes

My father loved to grow potatoes. I have fond memories of watching him as a boy of five years old. In the Spring of the year, as soon as the run-off subsided and the soil was dry enough to start the process, he would go to the garage to get his pail of seed potatoes.

Dad explained to me that you can’t just plant any old potatoes, you have to have good seed potatoes. He got them from a friend in the community, but I don’t know where that friend got them. The science of seed potatoes remains a mystery to me. I just know that you have to have them.

Dad would carry his pail of potatoes to the house, set it down in the small kitchen, get a knife from the drawer and start cutting them up, making sure that each piece had a good sprout growing from it.

At the end of the field that bordered the public road, the dirt was especially good . . . rich, black peat soil, that ran plenty deep. He would fire up the tractor, attach the one bottom plow and got to work. The soil was turned over, and then he would break it up and level it with a drag.

With a chisel plow, he would make deep furrows. Then, he would get his bucket of seed potatoes, push each piece into the dirt, and cover it over with the rich, black soil. When the little green potato leaves pushed up through the soil, it was time to “hill” the plants. Again he would pull the chisel plow through the soil, this time between the rows so that the plants were in a sort of raised mound.

Then it was time to watch them grow. When he thought the first plants might be ready, he dug out the beautiful round potatoes, he called new potatoes.

Then we would eat. Boy, would we eat!

There is nothing so delicious as a new potato, freshly dug out of the soil. There is a creamy texture and delicious taste that you just don’t find in store bought potatoes.

Well, we were very rich on our humble farm in so many ways, and the privilege of feasting on new potatoes was definitely one of them. Dad would take the process a step further by digging the remaining potatoes in the Fall of the year, filling gunny sacks and putting them in storage. Gunny sacks were tall bags made of burlap, perhaps similar to what the Bible calls sack cloth. A gunny sack could hold about fifty pounds of potatoes.

Process complete! We were ready to feast on homegrown potatoes all winter.

But sometimes, it all went wrong. Have you ever come upon a rotten potato? The smell is one of the vilest things you will ever encounter. You see, if one potato begins to rot in the bottom of the bag, and you don’t find it right away, pretty soon the whole bag is rotten, and you have to haul it out to the garbage. What a pity . . . and what a disappointment. All of your hard work has to be thrown on the garbage heap.

That’s why you had better keep an eye on your potatoes, checking them regularly for rot. If you forget about them, you might come to get potatoes one day, smacking your lips in anticipation of a grand meal, only to find them stinking to high heaven.

This is a perfect picture of sin and what it can do. One bad apple can spoil the whole barrel, and one bad potato can spoil the whole sack. If you neglect to keep watch over your life, you might find some awful rot creeping in, sin, and if you don’t find the sin in the sack and throw it far from you, you have a royal mess in your life.

Sin is harmful to your faith.

Sin will short circuit your faith.

Why? Well, sin is like the rot that ruins the whole sack of potatoes.

The saying I have heard from the pulpit may times is,

“Sin will take you where you don’t want to go,

and keep you longer than you want to stay.”

Sin has power. If you allow it to creep into your life, you may not be able to get rid of it when you want to get rid of it. The nature of an addiction is that you want to quit it, but you can’t. It has gotten too strong of a hold on you.

Paul said, “All things are lawful to me, but I will not come under the power of any (1 Cor 6:12 KJV). If sin overpowers you, you lose your freedom in Christ. You are no longer in control of your life. Sin controls you.

If you entertain it long enough, it becomes an addiction. The dictionary definition of an addiction is “a disease in which a person is unable to stop using a substance or engaging in a behavior.”

A sin or an addiction is like rot that permeates your faith. Affective, healthy faith is a wholeness that resides in your being. When sin or addiction enters in, it mixes with your faith and makes it very difficult to operate.

Everyone struggles with sin. It starts with a wrong thought. If you let the thought stay, and keep returning to it, eventually you will go out and do what you are thinking.

The best thing to do is to fill your mind with positive thoughts. Fill it with God’s Word to the point that there is no room for wrong thoughts.

Jesus said, “If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you (John 15:7 NKJV).” That is the picture of a whole, heathy, fulfilling Christian life in which your faith operates at maximum strength, because it is not mixed with sin.

Log in next week for the next installment, posted right here.