Snow Carrots

Snow cones (yummy), snow crab (lucious), snow peas (spectacular)…but snow carrots?  Hmmm…

When I saw them in the store, I thought, “What kind of AI-GMO madness is this”? It had to be a gimmick.  Carrots don’t grow in the snow, right? The package had a picture of these huge carrots sticking out of the snow. Ridiculous. (Of course I had to buy a bag). As it turns out, I was wrong. It’s not a gimmick. Here in Japan, there’s an agricultural delight known as “snow carrots”. For real. They are 100% natural, only available for a short time, and they are delicious!

Grown in a northern region of Japan where the temperature can reach – 3°C, these beauties are dug out of the soil by hand, one by one, amid the freezing winds and blowing snow. They are grown slowly for more than 5 months under the snow until they are ripe and then harvested during the coldest time of the year. (For perspective, US carrots are grown for about 2 months) Why go to all the trouble? Well, the snow acts like a blanket letting them ripen slowly, producing a larger, sweeter, and more nutritious carrot. Regular carrots that are grown year around can be tough, stout, and have a “grassy” taste. But these things have none of that. They are clean tasting, sweet and tender in the middle. 

So why am I telling you everything you never wanted to know about snow carrots? Well, I thought about how the harsh conditions are actually necessary and essential to creating their sweetness, tenderness, and nutritional value. The same can be true of us.  Here’s what I mean:

As followers of Christ, trials and adversity can create a sweetness, a tenderness in us, if we let it. In the Book of James it actually tells us to “consider it all joy when we face various trials because persevering will produce maturity.”¹  That’s right we can get better not bitter. But we must submit ourselves to Him. He allows trials to come our way not to crush us, not to “toughen us up”, not to break us, but to make us – make us more like Christ. Now that is sweet indeed.

“Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Hebrews 12:11 NKJV 

¹ James 1:2-4

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Mike and Lorie Ramsey