When I first decided to plant potatoes, I had no idea what I was doing. No idea how deep to plant them, no sense of how far apart they had to be spaced, no notion of what it would take to grow them or how long they would take to spring up. I certainly had no idea that I was not only planting potatoes, but a life lesson I would not soon forget.

Potatoes are supposed to be planted around one foot apart and in rows separated by approximately a foot and a half. To the uninitiated, as I was, this might seem like an absurd amount of space to give something as small as a potato, even if imagined in a bunch. But that is what the website advised, so that is what I did. Then I watered them daily, along with the rest of the garden crops.

Within four days, the sunflowers and string beans had sprung from the ground with such vigor that they seemed like miracles. Afterwards, I had no trouble imagining why seventeenth-century Englishmen had fallen in love with the then freshly penned tale we know today as Jack and the Beanstalk. Closer to the land than most moderns are, I felt sure they had succumb to the spell of how short the distance between magic and reality sometimes seems in nature.

The potatoes’ emergence into the world was less enthusiastic than that of the companion-planted sunflowers and beans’. Initially, they reminded me of the tame little shoots I had youthfully coxed into existence from potatoe-halves placed in miscellaneous water-filled jars. But by midsummer, every one of the ten tubers planted had discarded any pretense of modesty. Their enormous, leafy stocks swayed over the garden’s far end like bright green flags now fully unfurled.

A month later, flowers began appearing atop their verdant stands. Then came small, green, tomato-like fruits. They betrayed the potatoes’ kinship to the nightshade family, the same one to which their ketchup-producing blood brothers belonged. Instructions said to pluck off both the flowers and the fruits so that the full energy harvested by the plants would be diverted to the potatoes instead. Check and check – done!

Then I began researching harvest-times. It seemed they were nearing the end of their life-cycle, and I did not want to be caught flatfooted. What I found confused me. Every website that appeared advised against harvesting the potatoes until the plants were nearly dead. Picture after picture showed withered foliage that, had I happened across it while wandering a garden on my own, would have convinced me the crop had failed.

Then the truth dawned on me: I had been looking at potatoes completely wrong. In the scientific sense, the leaves were not mere plants. They were solar cells, and the potatoes were like batteries. The job of the leaves was to unfold like giant solar arrays, spread wide in the summer sun, then collect the high-energy light, and store it in the expanding potato-batteries hidden in the darkness below.

I had been spiritually wrong as well. In the typical way of the world, I had assumed that the most important part of the plants lay in their obvious, surface reality. All summer long I had marked success by the size of the leaves waving in the morning breeze, strutting high and proud two months into the season, crowned at last with garlands of green and white to signify the apex of their success.  

It did not occur to me until the last how wrong I was. From a spiritual perspective, the potatoes’ life cycle is almost a perfect mirror of the spiritual life cycle. All the bright goings and comings of life – our laughter in the spring, our joy beneath the mesmerizing warmth of summer, our struggle ‘midst the fall gale, the sporting of surface markers of success, even until the bitter end – were never the point.

For Chrisitans, as with potatoes, the entire reason for living is to grow into something stronger than death. It is to collect and store up the spiritual energy necessary to pass beyond the fall, through the long winter, and into the coming and eternal promise of spring. The character that grows, hopefully, beneath all the many layers of life and being, that is the point and promise of potatoes, and of the Christian life as well.

So, ” . . . Do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unsee; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18 RSVC).