Losing Hope
I love growing my own veg, so every spring I embark on the adventure with much dedication, enthusiasm and mixed success. The one plant that is normally guaranteed success is zucchini: one year I must have made every zucchini recipe ever published. Last spring, however, they failed to germinate.
I kept checking the package to see when I should start to see some life, but after four or five weeks had passed, I decided that the seeds must be old and I bought some new ones. I had given up hope.
I plant all my seeds in toilet rolls (which I insist we keep throughout the year, much to the amusement and maybe annoyance of my husband!) so I prepared some more and put them in the same container.
Two weeks later there were signs of life, proving that my old seeds were in fact just old. Then a couple of weeks later more seedlings started to sprout – from the other end of the container. What I had thought were the new seeds were in fact the original ones which I had given up on. Now I had six healthy zucchini seedlings and one winter squash which is more than enough to feed a family of two!
When it came to transplanting the seedlings, I had several toilet rolls full of good soil but no life, so I threw them all on my garden and into my containers. After all, you don’t waste good potting soil!
Life When You Least Expect It
I bought two new containers this year as all my seedlings wouldn’t fit in my garden bed, and our front yard gets all the sun so I figured that plants were more likely to be fruitful there and it would be a good investment. One advantage of new containers is that you don’t get weeds, so imagine my surprise when random shoots started appearing in the containers, where I knew I hadn’t planted anything! Similar shoots were appearing in the main garden bed as well, and they all looked incredibly like squash seedlings!
It slowly dawned on me that those dead, dried up, fruitless seeds that were still in the toilet rolls when I threw the dirt into my garden – yes, they had come to life, and were becoming fruitful (well, at this point they were just shoots, but you know what I mean!). I had given up hope too early.
The problem was that I knew if I left them where they were, there wouldn’t be enough space for them to grow and thrive.
After I had dug them all up, I had more than 20 additional squash plants. I don’t think I had even planted 20 seeds.
God Is Bigger Than Our Dreams
What a reminder to me, that God can take our dried up, dead and discarded dreams and breathe life into them. This was especially poignant to me after I had metaphorically buried several of my own dreams in that same garden bed only a few weeks earlier. Now I’ve asked God several times if this is a picture of me, and my old and ‘dried up’ eggs, but I haven’t heard anything back. Yet, I do know that it is a reminder for me, and hopefully for all of us, that God can and does breathe his resurrection life into our lives and into our hopes and dreams.
Is there something you had hoped for for years but have given up on? Maybe you are so worn down by the ongoing pandemic that you feel your dreams will never come to fruition. Or have you even forgotten your dreams or forgotten how to dream because there doesn’t seem an end in sight? Can I encourage you to keep praying to God about that dream or those dreams and maybe you will be surprised and even overwhelmed by God’s response.
Maybe you want to listen and reflect on these words by Lauren Daigle and be reminded that with God, even dry bones can come alive.
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