Some of my earliest memories are working in the garden with Mom: helping set up sassafras stick tepee frames for the vining green beans; dropping corn and bean seeds into long rows; forming up hills for planting squash, cucumber, or watermelon. I loved and still love the smell of freshly worked dirt, the feel of my fingers in loose soil.

But the magic, ah, yes, the real magic was in seeing the sprouting.

What else is like the coming forth of new plants? What else matches the exuberant majesty of green seedlings with their flourishing through bare earth? Such wonder, such joy, such promise. Even to this day, some sixty years later, I still elate at the emergence.

Even when I know it’s ridiculously too soon for seed to have sprouted, I still go to my small garden to check and see whether any new eruptions have made their way through the renewing cycle of moisture and warmth that wakes the transforming life within the seed and launches its growing. The reaching up of sprout and vine and the stretching down of root and fiber. Miracle, indeed, springing forth from the seed.

I wonder, and actually rather imagine with some conviction, that God also watches us with similar expectation. Knowing that faith has been sown within us, that Spirit cultivates his good work within us, that the Tendsman exercises diligent care and careful pruning.

Watchful for weeds and wary of the things that devour and destroy, I believe that our Creator moves in our midst to see the growing that testifies of our calling and the purpose of our creation. Sending forth the sun of the soul and the rain that refreshes heart and spirit, richly supplying all that is needed for our provision, so that we may mature and ripen, bearing the fruit of the Spirit and bringing forth seed after our own kind.

I hope that the Lord’s evening walks in the gardens of our lives brings him such satisfaction as I see in the blooms along the rows of this tiny patch of dirt in northeastern Kansas.

H. Arnett

6/3/2022