Imagine you are a farmer with one thousand acres of land. Five hundred acres is producing wonderful fruit and an abundant harvest. You have a variety of crops and a small orchard of fruit trees. But the other five hundred acres is completely neglected. This land is overrun with weeds; there are rocks in the field and a couple of abandoned old cars that have grass growing up through them.
Now consider how you want your future to be bigger than your past. You cannot plant your crops an extra time each year. The first five hundred acres is already producing all the fruit it is capable of producing. You could slave on the first five hundred acres and squeeze a little more out of it, increasing the crop size by a fraction.
If you genuinely want to build a bigger future, you will need to get into that neglected second five hundred acres of land and transform it into producing land. You need to get those old cars out of the field and remove the rocks. You need to pill out the weeds and till the soil. In this way you can almost double the harvest that you are producing.
The first five hundred acres is your strengths. Our culture obsesses over these and encourages us to focus on these alone. But that is because our culture does not have a vision for the human person. The culture has no interest in you becoming whole...But God has a much greater vision for you. And it is for this reason that he gently encourages you to explore the other five hundred acres of your farm --your weaknesses.
Matthew Kelley "Rediscover Catholicism"
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