Beginnings

I seem to be celebrating many new beginnings right now. Many of my friends are having babies or getting engaged. Even my best friend has just gotten engaged, and she got engaged to me! I praise God for all of these new beginnings, all of these big reminders that He is a God who is always at work. He is always building, always creating, always growing something, sometimes more obviously than others.

In this post I would like to celebrate some smaller new beginnings. When my parents visited last fall they brought a whole bunch of seeds. I should have planted them right away but we have a small problem (and some of them aren't very small) on our porch- rats. They love digging up our flower pots looking for food. I knew that if I planted seed they would eat it before it ever had half a chance to grow. Then, a couple of weeks ago, my superhero roommate brought home some chicken wire. Last Wednesday night I decided that the fullness of time allotted for my gardening woes had been fulled.

Now, you may remember that I bought a garden-in-a-box last year. That little endeavor met with mixed success. The tomato plant didn't do well in the move and never produced a single tomato. The spring onion and chive looked identical to me, and since I couldn't tell which was which I never used them. The dill died a mysterious death. The basil plant, however, grew into a veritable bush. I have an entire ziploc bag of basil in my freezer, my uneducated attempt at freeze-drying (it's supposed to preserve more nutrients and flavor than regular drying). Then my bush died when I was out of the country visiting my girlfriend for a week and a half in the middle of hot season and nobody bothered to water it. Ah well, you win some and you loose some.

I later planted some ginger in the deserted planter box and to my utter astonishment it began to sprout.  Unfortunately the rats noticed it as well. Thus ended the ginger.

All of that to say, I had an empty planter box that needed filling, and once I got some chicken wire it was high time I filled it. I put in a row of lettuce and a row of beans. In just two days, the entire row of lettuce came up and one little lonely bean plant:

I was quite surprised at the sudden appearance of the lettuce plants. I watered the whole planter box and waited to see what would happen. By the following evening, almost the whole row of bean plants had poked out of the surface and were already four times the height of the lettuce plants! Tonight, just 5 nights after planting, the bean plants are going to town. They are now taller than my longest fingers by a good margin.

Meanwhile the lettuce doesn't seem to have grown hardly at all. Even though it came up more quickly than the row of beans, now it hardly seems to have grown at all by comparison. I think sometimes life is like that. We expect some things to come quickly but instead we end up waiting for them almost indefinitely, while other gifts spring up in our lives before we even realize how much we need them. In either situation, the key is to keep rejoicing in the sun!