One year, one of my butternut squash vines produced this gigantic squash to end all squashes, and it also taught me a life lesson that only the squash vines could teach.

Before we begin, let’s get all the dirty jokes out of our systems: yes, I’m fully aware of what this squash is inadvertently shaped like. Insert unoriginal and immature middle school jokes here, ha ha ha, hee hee hee, giggity giggity giggity. Done? Cool. Now let’s get on with our lesson.

You see, this particular squash plant was the most frustratingly slow one in my garden that year. Whereas all her sisters were consistently producing squashes as expected, this plant would produce a small baby squash, gave me false hope that I would get a normal-sized squash, but then before the baby squash could grow, it would turn yellow and drop off the vine. ☹️

By early August, I was about to give up and pull up the plant for its underachieving record. But then I noticed something strange happening.

Another baby squash was growing from the vine and this time, it had made past the stage where the prior squashes had dropped. So I left her alone to see what she could do.

That squash turned out to be the most spectacular squash in my garden that year.

It turned out that the underachieving squash vine was no fool. She didn’t care to produce 3-4 average, mediocre squashes. She was saving all her energy to produce that one grand prize squash to rule them all. She was the Queen.

So the Queen squash vine made me think of all the many different projects/tasks/busy works that we take on everyday because we feel obligated to or because we’re afraid to disappoint other people. So we spread our energy thin among 20 different things, producing 20 mediocre results.

But maybe if we focus our time and energy into JUST the most important things, and those things are different for everyone according to our life’s purpose and ability….then we would produce 1 or 2 or 3 spectacular results, rather than 20 mediocre results.

Just food for thoughts 😉 .