A Plowman Ought to Plow in Hope.

Outside our dining room window is a rather straggly lilac bush. It’s been in that location for some time and early on we did a heavy duty number on the ancient stump of the “mother” plant. It was fairly well rotted through and when we broke it off and dug up the remains, we found it was riddled with termites. We cut the straight sucker shoots off the live plant a couple of years in a row in an attempt to consolidate it’s efforts. It really looked dead for a while. The living portion has been leafing somewhat, and this year for the first time in years, is forming healthy looking, fat, and sassy buds.

It goes to show, things take time.

Every spring we shovel out the finally broken down compost and add it to our raised beds in an attempt to get bigger, better tomatoes. These I turn into sauce for use throughout the year.

Our sons are the same in one sense, though much more complicated to grow. And our mistakes are much more visible. Though if any of this depended solely on us, we’d be sunk. So we plod on.

Plowing. Planting. Watering. Weeding. In hope.

Rainbows

Four prisms hang in our living room window. Low early spring sunlight shines through them, spattering various surfaces red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Consider the mechanics of differing wavelengths producing something visible. It’s an amazing concept. Reflections off a surface traveling through the air, through the human lens, stimulating cone cells on the retina, and interpreted as color by the brain.

The first rainbow was a promise. God sent it after He flooded the world in judgement of sin. Only Noah and his family remained alive. The rainbow reminded them He would never flood the entire earth again in judgement. A comforting thought. Most of the time we don’t even think about that when we see a rainbow, just that it’s pretty and somewhat uncommon.

I visited a family friend, Lois, in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania as a youngster. Her concrete block home had a wall of windows on one side, looking down a hill, over a row of trees, a river, then New Jersey. Angry cloud and rain showers moved across the ground in the distance across the river. Flashing lightening in a darkened field, with incongruous sunny patches on either side as far as you could see. When the storm finally moved on, the sky shone in it’s wake with an awesome double rainbow.

Rainbows follow after storms. You might get a smaller imitation in the mist of a sprinkler on a bright summer day, but the real deal comes after real rains. Just when we’ve gotten discouraged and wonder if there’s hope. That there are no promises left. It comes when we need it. If we just look for it.