Planting seeds….

Here it is November…yesterday morning was 28. Today is warmer…and it’s rainy again……but winter is definitely coming. Hard to believe just a few weeks ago we hit the 80s…and now the leaves are flying off, I have to scrape the frost off the car windows before heading to the gym in the morning, and it’s almost time to wear wear gloves when I walk the dog… And of course, everyone’s favorite: the time change just happened. (Did anyone tell Cuddles? Because she still thinks 5 p.m. is 6 p.m and it’s eating time!)

Each season has its beauty…and I do enjoy snowshoeing and cross-country skiing…which this year I’ll be able to do. Like many of you, it’s time to transition to pulling out the winter gear to be prepared for all this weather fun. 🙂  In addition to digging up the winter clothes, finding the LL Bean boots, and getting the snow shovel/ice scrapers ready, it’s also time for Christmas music apparently (yes, heard it playing outside when I went to the gym) and Starbucks holiday beverages.

Oddly, it’s also time for tomatoes. Really?! I just had an email from Johnny’s Seeds. 🙂 I thought they used to come after the holidays to cheer us during the dark, cold days of January.  But my e-catalogs are already starting to come….and making me think about seeds. And gardening. I can’t wait!!

I’m not the world’s award-winning gardener by any means. Sometimes the best plans go awry–for example, critical questions arise such as do I want to weed or go kayaking? 🙂 Then you have weather issues…too dry/too wet/too hot/too damp/late frost/early frost….But still we try, right?

Remember the “faith the size of a mustard seed?” If you’ve ever held things like mustard seeds, celery seeds, or carrot seeds, you know they are small. Fragile. Sometimes blown off course when you are trying to use them. There are days where we might feel like our faith is just like that…or even smaller than a mustard seed. Life seems to buffet us from every side, and we’ve landed on a rock. Or we’ve been trampled by some size 12 L L Bean boots on muddy soil. Or we’ve been blown out over the river and ridden way off course. Or we sprouted and then struggled to survived in a long hot summer drought.

Sometimes we do find ourselves in an unexpected location, and we feel like we don’t have much to offer or grow with. That’s where the others around us help us get started…make a little progress….start to grow some roots. And sometimes we get an entirely different harvest….and we realize that tiny faith grew and grew….into something way more beautiful than the catalog picture we had in our mind.

Matt. 17:20 He replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”