Gourd Seed Viability And The Redemption Of Man

Gourd Seed Viability and the Redemption of Man Four years ago my mother spear headed a cleaning extravaganza in our garage where everything was thrown into the driveway, packed tightly into plastic boxes, and shoved even tighter back into the sparse shelving of our 1980's wood paneled garage. This cleaning spree around my home is rightly defined as an extravaganza as it often leads to organized chaos, which, from a third person point of view is highly entertaining. Several days ago I found one of these plastic boxes full of seeds from a time when my family "had time for a garden" spent time snapping beans, and canning anything that would fit into a quart mason jar. It was hard work. It was good work. It was good, hard work that made you appreciate the food on the table. As a child I loathed every bean bore by every plant, but I've come to reconciliation with this. It is this reconciliation which that box of seeds has come to represent. I went through each bag and packet of seeds remembering each and knowing the fruit of each. From this box I pulled a cool whip bowl of unmarked seeds, seeds that for me needed no external markings. I knew instantly those were my gourd seeds. Those seeds came from the seeds I saved from other gourds that I found, they were the second generation of my seed stock. I had cared for them from gourd to seed and back again. I returned home from college last week with a determination to plant a garden filled with heirloom species of vegetables with names like, Stowell's Evergreen Corn, Ellen's Family White Cucumbers, Cow Horn Okra, Boston Pickling cucumber and any other name that would resonate with our mental perceptions of 19th century America. I experimented with strip tillage, built Indian mounds for the "Three Sisters" corner, and felt the most soil alive in my palms. My immensely planned garden of course included room for my gourds, gourds I knew whom all odds were against. Mother time and the instability of garage climates were sure to have taken their toll on my gourd seeds, there was very little chance that they were viable and worth my time planting. I planted them anyway. I don't know why I planted them, it defied my own logic. I stood no ground to gain a delicious edible crop from planting the gourds if they did even germinate. Of the grocery bag full there were probably less than a handful of seeds that had even a slight chance. Maybe it was curiosity, hope, or maybe it was stupidity that made me plant those hopeless gourd seeds. I think, however, that there must have been more to that chemical equation which led to my decision to plant against all odds. I didn't plant all of the seeds and it was while debating over whether to throw the remaining seeds away or not, I discovered something startling about my logic. Not startling in a scary way, it was the same startling you feel when you note yourself acting exactly like your mother or father. I realized that there was an analogous story of all time paralleling that specific moment where I debated the fate of those gourd seeds. I like my seeds, I hopelessly liked my seeds. I was attached in a illogical manner for all logic and reason told me to discard those seeds - to throw them into the compost pile, and use the resulting material to grow a new crop which would no doubt have a better chance of surviving coming from a newer seed stock. I kept those seeds and planted those seeds with the hopeless hope that maybe one would be good, maybe one would bare fruit from which I could begin a fresh generation. This is the logic of God. Made in the image of God, I reason like God, I think like God. I may not reason or think as deeply, or as completely as God but I do reason in a like manner. As I looked down into that old reused cool whip bowl of old mostly dead and seemingly hopeless seeds, God looked down at his cool whip bowl of people, of old mostly spiritually dead and seemingly hopeless people. As I knew that the majority of those seeds would defy my precious time by never bearing fruit, God knows that a majority of these people will defy him and never bear fruit. As I hoped for these seeds, God hopes for his people. For all of time God has hoped hopelessly for his gourd seeds, and loved unreasonably for his gourd seeds. The hope of God for his people, is his grace to us. This is where the parallel stories fork, but yet still lead us to a realization of that taken for

granted. I cannot take a seed germ and make it alive again, but God can take a soul from death to life. God redeems his seeds from a life of unfruitfulness, I cannot.

NS

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