What Doesn't Make Sense, And Yet...

It is the height of the summer.   The plants push against each other like children at recess.  What was once a cultivated bed of seedlings equally spaced has taken on a life of its own, creating a jungle without the lines of apparent design.  By this time, the garden should be laden with fruit.

Instead it is almost dead, the leaves yellowing, and vines now brown and limp.  The once-tall stalks which vied for attention appear like the hands of students raised in class -- "me, me, call on me" -- now lay lifeless on the ground as if the last breath has been stomped out of them.

Even the young buds of new vegetables are stunted and shriveled.   Some plants have been violated by bugs, the smooth skins of peppers and tomatoes marred, holes left in the pale jackets of beans,  every possible blossom consumed, leaving only disappointment behind.

The sprouts, the plants, even the seeds had looked so promising in spring.  But what desolation has happened here?  Not enough water, too much water, not enough fertilizer, or too much.  Everyone has a theory, the weather, the heat, or "just a bad year," said with a resounding sigh.  No one knows.

But yet, I have seen wild plants flowering out of sheer rock and entire trees flourishing where they should not even exist, and still they thrive.  What is their secret strength, what kind of stubbornness redeemed for glory?  And I know people too who dance to hidden tunes and dare to possess gentle floods of secret joy.

They are those whose story has been changed, those who cannot help but bear fruit even in a barren place, those who stand beyond explanation but rooted fully in grace.  And they thrive with a strength that is not their own.  They love hilariously, manifest impossible fruit, and know what Resuurection means.

"Live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist," wrote Cardinal Emmanuel Celestine Suharto, archbishop of Paris, 1940-1949.

We can live that way,
we cannot help but live that way,
   because God is not if,
           God is.

Though the fig tree do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
He makes my feet like hinds' feet,
He makes me tread
                upon my high places.

                             Habakkuk 3. 17-19

(This posting was adapted from my journal, an entry dated August 8, 1998).