Thursday, March 24, 2011

Faith is like…

This is what it looks like outside:

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When my mom mentioned they were getting snow in Minnesota yesterday and that my sister and her family ended up staying at a hotel rather than making it in from Wisconsin as expected I thought to myself how glad I was that we lived somewhere else.  It was a nice thought…unfortunately it was also a short-lived thought.

Thankfully, this is what we did last week for Family Home Evening:

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After reading Alma 32 comparing faith to planting a seed, we let the girls help get some tomato, pepper, and flower plants started.  They each also have a tomato plant that is going to be especially theirs to take care of.  Amber was really fun to watch: she would gently tuck each little seed in its cup and say “good night, little seed!  Sleep well!”  (The seeds may or may not have been the only thing that got “watered” as part of this activity… :)

It does get you thinking.  Given the length of our growing season, if we waited for sunny skies to start our seeds there would never be enough time for the hot-weather plants to produce.  And even if we didn’t live in the snow capital of the continental states, you can’t start from seeds in June and have fresh tomato slices for the Fourth of July.  It still feels a little silly gardening while we have weeks of winter weather ahead, but just thinking about the slices of drippy red tomatoes each early-season sprout represents gets me excited about everything in store for our little seedlings and I feel suddenly more determined to make it through another month (or more?) of cold.

What fun it would be to have a seed catalog for real life.  It would be easy to lose hours paging through glossy pictures of all the wonderful aspirations in the world, picking out pretty little packets of experience-seeds. 

Of course, our garden’s small and there isn’t ever enough time, so in the end I suppose we would want to order primarily from select varieties renowned for particularly sweet fruits and notable yields: 8-year-old baptisms…seminary graduations…missions…temple marriages…charitable hearts…senior missions.  Some of those seem far away, even more so than tomatoes on a snowy day, but I hear the seasons change quickly and that big crops start with little seeds tucked in tight waiting for spring. 

So, let the blizzards blow, because even if it’s icy outside, this is what it looks like inside:

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3 comments:

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  2. This reminds me of a time when I heard a girl give a speech in front of the entire population of BYU and was a chemistry major, and everyone in the writing center said, "It's not right for a chemist to be able to write so well..." And it's still true. You are an amazing writer.

    Right now I feel like I cannot even remotely picture any of my little plants bearing fruit someday. I so often feel that I am messing things up so much every single day. But I guess the thing about faith is that it is a still and continuous worker--not an overnight bloomer. All I can do is wait and hope for the best (oh and try my hardest too I suppose). :)

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  3. Very, very nice post. Nicely said....and the pictures were great too!

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