Faith Like a Tater

I recently had a dream. I walked outside and saw bushes covered in beautiful purple flowers. They were planted beside a cinderblock wall, and there was a second tier in the flower bed that also held flowers. As I peered through the blossoms, I noticed potatoes hanging from roots that had spread over the wall. They were just hanging there. I picked the potatoes and brought them inside.

I looked at my daughter and said, “We have potatoes growing out there.”

She replied, “Well, yes—we planted those. Remember?”

I didn’t remember.

Then I woke up.

I always pay attention to my dreams, because if I remember them, they usually carry spiritual significance. The Lord often uses dreams to speak to my heart, and I love that about Him.

Do you remember when we were younger and there were secret messages on the backs of cereal boxes that you had to decode? Dreams are like that to me. They are a kind of secret love language—something I get to decipher. And when I finally understand the message, my heart leaps.

Job 33:15–18 says,
“For God speaks once, yea twice, yet man perceives it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls upon men, in slumbering upon the bed; then He opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction.”

God did this over and over again in Scripture. He showed Joseph in a dream that Jesus was the Son of God. He warned Joseph to take the child and flee to Egypt. He showed the other Joseph his future and revealed to him the coming seasons of feast and famine. He showed a Midianite that Gideon would defeat their army through a dream of a loaf of bread tumbling into their camp and overturning a tent. Dreams were one of the ways God communicated things people needed to heed—things they might not hear or understand while awake.

This was readily accepted in biblical times. Today, however, many people dismiss dreams altogether. They assume God no longer speaks this way. I believe that is a mistake.

So I examine every dream to see whether the Lord may be speaking something significant to me. Sometimes I gain no clarity at all, or perhaps the dream is more connected to the pizza I ate the night before. But other times, I uncover rich truths He wanted to communicate.

When I woke up from this dream, I kept thinking about the potatoes. I thought about how I didn’t even remember planting them. I thought about how my daughter assumed a harvest was obvious—after all, we had planted them.

As I reflected, I realized several things.

Potatoes grow underground, so there is no way to see what kind of harvest you will have. You may or may not see greenery above the soil. When it does appear, it can encourage faith—evidence that something is happening beneath the surface. But sometimes the greenery never sprouts, or it wilts, and that can be deeply discouraging. There is no outward sign of growth, nothing to spur your faith on.

In those moments, the temptation is to dig up the ground to see whether anything is happening at all. But doing that risks damaging the very harvest you are waiting for.

The fact that the potatoes were growing over a wall can represent trials, boundaries, or limitations—something that must be overcome. Yet those obstacles had not prevented the fruit from growing. Potatoes growing over a wall suggest overcoming obstacles and extending beyond personal limitations.

Though the potatoes were out of the ground, they were still clinging to the roots. This points to the heart and foundation of faith (Isaiah 61:3; Jeremiah 17:7–8). The potatoes hanging by the root suggest being securely anchored in faith, even while suspended in a precarious position.

Potatoes are a fitting metaphor for faith. They grow in dark places and are not revealed until the proper time.

This is why faith is like potatoes.

How many things have been planted and then forgotten?

God has not forgotten your seed, nor the work you did to get it into the ground. You may not see it, but He does. He is the Lord of the harvest. You *will reap what you have sown—just give it time.

Don’t dig up your seed to check on it. Let it lie. Let seeds do what seeds do.

No matter the obstacles surrounding your seed, cling to the root, who is Christ. He will not let you go, no matter how far it feels like you are dangling. Hold on to Him, and He will hold on to you.

Waiting is hard. We live in a culture of instant gratification. We want to see fruit immediately, and when we don’t, we question whether it’s worth continuing to plant.

But it is. It is worth it.

Sometimes the seeds we plant are forgotten simply because it takes so long to see results. But that is the beauty of waiting—one day, you are surprised by the harvest.

So I say this to you, and to myself: our faith seeds are still worth planting.

There will be a harvest. There will be.

Until then, keep clinging to the vine.