a dream and a garden

Just a moment ago or maybe it was almost 10 years, I had the idea that people might like to follow the unordinary life of a missionary family on furlough. I blogged. At least a little bit. Because when you are an ordinary  mom with 4 little girls on a road trip that lasts three months and the most amazing accomplishment in 24 hours is the very ordinary effort to keep them clean, alive, and on a good day, with hair brushed 5 minutes before you walked into the next new church, there was not always time for profound blogging. Sigh. 

Still, what happens when the God of creativity crafted your version of Eve with a drop of ‘created to write’ at the seminal moment that your soul drew its first breath? Once upon a time, I heard a writer say, ‘If you are truly a writer, the first thing you think about when you open your eyes in the morning is writing.’ I drew in a fast breath and muttered under my breath, “I do that.”

One of greatest journeys we ever take is this discovery of the dreams that God planted in the garden of our hearts. Sewn seeds grow to relinquish their fragrance and a symphony of buzzing and humming pollinates the world. It is not by accident that humanity’s greatest story begins and ends in a garden. It is our metanarrative. Each of us.  All of us. Planted for a purpose.

What great mysteries are revealed in the stress of 12 cramped legs in an over-stuffed van on an all-night journey through the desert? Is the plight of humanity served by the realization that the universe itself contains not enough nuggets of wisdom to help one mom settle midnight squabbles? From a realistic, human perspective, these questions do not even deserve an answer. And, yet, I write. I blog.

When the dew shivers for the sun’s first kiss, the first sleepy shoots of consciousness are already searching to write a letter to the world.  The Gardner is calling.

See, its not really about us and how gifted we are.  Truthfully, God gave good gifts to each of us. He is like that. He dropped something of incredible value into every Adam and Eve.

So, what about you, in this beautiful season of your life with its freshly turned, black as gold, ready to be planted, soil. What about you?

It is so funnily profound. God drops his dreams in our not-yet souls and then he waits, patiently, for us to breathe out a ‘yes’ to his will. He walks with us in the garden and he nurtures and tends those tiny tendrils. They grow. If we let them. And the Gardner feeds a world with the produce of a very ordinary garden.

A garden. A table. Coincidence that these two very ordinary metaphors are so deeply woven into the very fabric of our most important story? Not a chance.

“But the seed falling on good soil … hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

“Take and eat.”

Beautiful isn’t it?  Our story. His garden. Our dreams. His will. ‘Yes’. Harvest.