Metaphor Time

This past spring I picked up a box of wildflower seeds from Dollar Tree. It was on a whim, but aren’t most purchases from Dollar Tree? I didn’t really have a spot in mind but then I remembered the field behind our house, one that is attached to an elementary school but is mostly a field of grass with one ball diamond and an area that is sometimes used as a soccer field. There are a couple of sections of bare dirt ten feet or so off a roadway, sunbaked and barren, but I figured why not?

One evening the kids and I hacked into the hard earth with shovels, not really breaking down farther than a couple of inches. We didn’t really work that hard at it because it was only a buck. Then they sprinkled the seeds and the mix inside the box seemed to be mostly perlite filler, but again, just a buck. Then we raked over the seeds and I lugged a couple of five gallon buckets of water over from my house to get the seeds settled in. Some spring rains provided the rest of the water and a week or two later, after the mowing crew did their first mow, we gathered up a few armloads of grass to make a rather incomplete mulching. Over the next few weeks we would check our garden in the field when walking over to the playground but nothing was happening and we soon forgot about it.

Fast forward to July. Where we live July is dry and hot, the time when you stop mowing the lawn for a few weeks because it’s not growing. One morning while taking a walk I was going past our barren plot and it occurred to be to check. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so I walked down the ditch from the roadway and over to the forgotten garden. There were flowers! Scraggly, spindly things holding on for life, but there they were, pops of color growing out of what was little more than dried mud.

My mind was turned to prayer and God’s overflowing goodness. I’ll pray for something for a day or two and then saunter off on my merry way, forgetting my request. But behind the scenes God is often working while I do nothing. And then BLAMMO! FLOWERS! I don’t know how many times I had even forgotten that I’d asked for flowers or wasn’t even looking for them to bloom and passed them on by. Or if I see them I don’t put two and two together and fail to thank the One who answers prayers with blessings.

Make up your own allusions for this next part. They started mowing the field and the first couple of times they mowed around the patch of dirt. But eventually a government employee mowed zoomed over the top, nipping off the flower heads. Fear not… one week later and these stubborn plants were beginning to flower again.