Monday’s index cards read: “Clean Coop”, “Compost?” and “Plant bulbs”.

Easy choice.  Out to the flower beds I go!

Yep, these are some of the same beds that were crawling with poison ivy and mocking weeds just a few months ago when we arrived at the farm.  The weeds aren’t so haughty now, I must say.

It’s a strange thing to wait half a year for something to arrive, isn’t it?  

I consider this while stamping my boot down firmly over a deep hole that now entombed a solitary tulip bulb.  It’s disconcerting to my modern senses, this waiting around idly for twenty-six-or-so weeks; nothing more for me to do but wonder and hope.

During those wintry hours of me waiting by the fire, however, the buried bulbs are hardly idle.  They will suffer the frigid winter, groan underground, crack through crinkled skin, and finally burst open in the dark, cold dirt sometime in April.

As if that’s not enough, five or six months from now, their roots will also have to fight, tooth and nail, to race their poison ivy neighbors up towards the sunny surface…where I’ll most certainly be waiting to greet one and murder the other.

These will be need to be some very tough and feisty tulips.

Through those months of short days and long, cold nights, the bulb’s ultimate task will be to die.  If she doesn’t crack, her roots won’t grow and the tulips won’t show.

Pretty sobering, I must say.

Isn’t it nature’s way to point us to simple truth?

Occasionally, we are buried deep in some solitary dirt and covered over for a season.  No one can predict when these occasions will arrive, or how long they’ll remain.  Maybe you are there, now?

That time has certainly arrived for me!  It doesn’t take much investigative soul-searching to realize.

My gentle Gardener has stamped his boot down firmly on the loam of my life, pressed me squarely into the earth and told me to be still and wait awhile.

“Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him”

Scary thing is that I know I need to crack, to shed, a part of me to die, even.

Sweet thing is that through this dying, there is promised an eventual and timely beauty. When the moment is right and the Gardener is ready for some crazy, wild farm flowers in this corner of his garden, I’ll be ready.

My daily breaths, whether I am waving happily in the sun or buried deep underground,  are given not for my own pleasure and benefit.

Each new breath is given lovingly by the Gardener so that there might be a stunning, fragrant, vibrant Garden of Heaven here on earth.

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!

“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.” (Job 12:10)