Spring in the Heart

“You visit the earth and water it; you greatly enrich it… you bless its growth.” — from Psalm 65:9–10

This chapter is for anyone whose faith feels small — too small to count.

Picture the very first days of spring. The field still looks like bare, cold, cracked mud. But if you get down and look closely, there — pushing up through the hard ground — is the tiniest green blade of wheat. It’s nothing much. You could easily mistake it for a weed, or miss it entirely. But it’s alive, and it’s the beginning of the whole harvest.

Spurgeon says that first green blade is exactly what the first stirrings of God in a person look like — and the whole point of the chapter is: don’t despise it for being small. Jesus described how it works — “first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain” — in that order, on purpose. Nobody gets the full ripe wheat on day one. So if your faith is at the green-blade stage, you’re not failing. You’re on schedule.

What does the green blade actually look like in a real person? Spurgeon is beautifully gentle here. It’s not big dramatic experiences. It’s a genuine wanting — a real desire, however faint, to know God and be right with him. It’s prayer that barely qualifies as prayer — sometimes just an “Oh,” or a sigh, or a tear you couldn’t explain. It’s finding you actually want to be where God is talked about. It’s the very beginnings of trusting Jesus, even when you couldn’t give a neat account of it. Tiny things. Real things. Green blades.

And here’s the tender part: God sees them. The psalm says God himself waters and blesses “the growth” — the little springing-up nobody else even notices. Spurgeon points out that God is so attentive to the small stirrings in you that he’s said to keep your tears in a bottle. The blade that a passer-by would tread on without a glance is the blade God is bending down to look after.

He gives some lovely pictures for this. Shepherds, he says, stay up all night at lambing time — you don’t leave the newborn thing to fend for itself; you watch over it precisely because it’s new and fragile. That’s how God treats a brand-new faith, and it’s how older Christians ought to treat younger ones — gently, not stamping on the green blade for not being a full field yet. And he says something you should hold onto if you feel like a beginner: an apple tree loaded with fruit is a great sight, but an apple tree in blossom is even lovelier. There’s a particular beauty to the just-beginning stage. God isn’t impatiently tapping his foot waiting for you to be impressive. He delights in the blossom.

One more, because it’s so true to how faith often starts: sometimes a little bird, chased by a hawk, will fly straight into a person’s chest for safety. Fear drives it to the only refuge it can find. Spurgeon says that’s often what running to God looks like at first — not a calm, confident stride, but a scared, desperate bolt toward the only safe thing. And that counts. That’s the bird landing exactly where it should.

So if you’ve been quietly assuming your faith doesn’t count because it’s small, or shaky, or just-started — this chapter is God telling you otherwise. The green blade is not less real than the harvest. It’s the harvest, at the beginning.

One thing to do if your faith feels too small to matter: stop measuring it against someone else’s full field, and instead do the one thing a green blade does — keep growing toward the light. Say the small prayer. Show up where God is. Protect the blade instead of despising it. What God has started, God waters.