Special Delivery

Suddenly I feel bone-tired of learning everything the hard way.

If there is an easier way to learn, I am all for it. Even at the price of needing to pay attention to some owner’s manual. And who’s this owner anyway?, I wonder. And what else does this manual have to say? Can it help me turn this weedy wasteland into - if not Better Homes and Gardens showcase - at least a mediocre, pass-the-HOA-mustard yard that doesn't necessitate threatening letters from the president on monthly basis? Can it make something out of ... nothing...? Make… me, even me… a brown-thumb-city-girl, the destroyer of all things green... into.. .a gardener?

I shake my head as if to dismiss the impossibly ridiculous notions swirling about my head. But before I can ask anything, the Outer Space Gardener takes the microscope and the pie from my hands and replaces them with a pair of rubber gloves and pepto-bismol galoshes.

What are these? 

Galoshes - I picked them out especially for you.  Like them? He grins clearly satisfied with himself.

I cringe at the fashion statement he is trying to make.

They are just lovely, I squeeze between my teeth. I don't really need them, though.

Oh, yes you do, he yells over his shoulder, placing the pie inside the garage refrigerator.

Need them for what???

Shoveling... Cow manure. Premium grade. He proudly points to the reeking mountain inside the trailer. I got a great deal on it and since your yard hasn’t eaten anything in years, thought you could use a little extra… but you’ll need these before we jump in.  

He grabs a couple of shovels and looks at me as if he just invited me to a picnic in the park.

I look at the mountain of cow dung towering over our house and know that in an instant I have become the one neighbor in our subdivision everyone loves to hate.

He (Abraham) dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, he believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. Romans 4:17,18