So one day we decided to pick the corn and, as we did, OH MY GOSH, the colours! They looked amazing, a little bit like they were going to taste like jelly beans. We threw them in a pan and began to boil them for our dinner.
After 10 minutes we bit into them but they were rock hard. Perhaps they needed longer, so we gave them 20 minutes and they were just as hard as before. So we figured that because they’re fresh from the garden perhaps we were over boiling them. So we got some new ones and boiled them for 5 minutes and, frustratingly, it was like biting on stones.
We were gutted.
I thought ‘What’s the point of this if you can’t eat it? It’s useless.’
But then we found a page online revealing something that surprised us. This wasn’t the corn we had thought it was, with this variety you had to harvest it, hang out to dry and then the hard kernels fall off ready to be made into popcorn! So needless to say the corn was all hung up and we’re looking forward to a winter’s worth of popcorn and trying out different flavours.
When we were trying to cook it and it wasn’t softening I was thinking ‘This sweetcorn is literally rubbish, I want to rip it all out of the ground and stick it in the bin.’ I was so annoyed that it didn’t do what I wanted it to do. It wasn’t until I read of its potential that I realised its value. It’s really made me think about the way we feel and think about ourselves.
Often we look at ourselves and see the things that we can’t do, the things that we aren’t, we can feel unvaluable, unlovely and sometimes useless. Have you ever felt like that? I have! But what if we haven’t discovered our potential yet? We can’t assume that because we’ve got a low grade that we’ll never amount to anything. We can’t assume that because we’re not in a relationship that we’re not loved and lovable. We can’t assume that because we don’t look like the influencers we see on social media (and let’s face it 99.9% of us don’t) we’re not hugely valuable, special and beautiful.
Please don’t write yourself off or believe that you’re a piece of rubbish. It’s taken effort to harvest and hang up the sweetcorn and it’s taking time to wait for it to be ready.
Realising your potential takes time and effort. Make sure you watch those negative thoughts that creep in – you’re not useless, you’re not inadequate. You have skills, gifts and talents even if you don’t see them yet. Please don’t confuse how you’re feeling with what you’re capable of.
