Lessons from plants

Sometimes I really envy farmers.
Not the industrial grow-enough-with-Monsanto-to-feed-an-entire-county kind of farmer. The kind of farmers where they grow a nice size garden for themselves and maybe to sell on the corner. Like my grandparents.
I envy them because they know things about God and life that they probably don't even realize.
I started thinking about this again (yes, it's crossed my mind before) today after a storm blew through: I got home from work to find that my little flower garden out back had been somewhat ravaged by the wind and pelting rain. Half the stalks were bent down the ground (we won't get into how little help their shallow root systems were). I tried to pour some more dirt around them to get them to stand up to no avail. I finally took to propping them up against one another to form little make-shift tee-pees of sorts. It worked!

Lesson 1: When we can't stand alone we can lean on each other and both give and receive support at the same time.

A few were too far away or too far gone to get propped up so I snipped off the blooms and brought them inside. At first I felt bad about it but then I realized...

Lesson 2: God's grace in even making Heaven available in the first place. I mean, we could be like regular flowers and when we die, well, the end, that's it, goodbye. No harm no foul, just nothing. But He enjoys us, He wants to keep us around. So He brings us in to His home to give us another life (albeit I have not granted the flowers eternal life in their vases)

As these lessons sunk in I started thinking about everything I've learned in my short and scattered time working on my little garden. From admiring the deep and vast root systems of ivy to learning the necessity of digging up hard ground, and I found myself examining one particular plant with no flowers on it yet. It somehow wound up scattered over in the rockier dirt, even though that is not where I originally put it. Instead of being pissed at it's late blooming, I admire it's ability to grow even without proper care. It's smaller than the others (which actually saved it from toppling over today) and so far flower-less but I am excited about it. I wonder what color the flowers will be. I've been extra careful to make sure it gets water over the summer, since it's not with the rest and would get missed in my sporadic watering otherwise. I can't transplant it to better dirt because it would kill it, or at least make it lose all it's buds, so I try to care for it where it is.

Lesson 3: The course of life usually dumps people in less than perfect situations. It's not what God wanted, but it's the way life is now. But He doesn't throw up His hands and forget about them, or become angry that they're not as successful as other people. Instead He watches them with eagerness and even pours out blessings on them. He doesn't completely move their life (usually) because that would ruin so much of who they are and the beauty of what they could accomplish, so He cares for us where we are.

No wonder He refers to farmers so often.