RICHARD BEAVERS
Seeds of faith L
By Scott Seeke
ast week, at the end of a rough day, I did what I oſt en do when stressed. I went outside, sat
down and picked a strawberry from my garden. I twirled the tiny red fruit in my fi ngers, examining this miracle God had grown right out- side my window. T en I popped it in my mouth. As it exploded with sweet fl avor, I knew we were going to be OK. My fi rst garden was born out
of desperation. When I became a mission developer in 2006, I knew it was a risk. My salary was barely enough to pay our bills. As long as nothing major broke, we could scrape by. T en the air conditioner died. It
was early summer in Georgia, and we had a 6-month-old and a 3-year- old. Spending a summer without air conditioning was inconceivable so we had a new unit installed. Wondering how we were going
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How could any of them grow into anything we could actually eat?
to pay for it, I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff . I started looking for ways to save
money and thought a garden might help our bottom line. T roughout my childhood in
upstate New York, my parents had planted a large garden. For some reason they quit gardening during my teen years, but I still remem- bered the basics. I went to Home Depot to see how expensive a gar- den would be and ended up buying a bag of soil and seeds for two kinds of tomatoes, green peppers and let- tuce. T e bill was $8. At home I read the back of the
packets and found out that it was probably too late in the season to grow lettuce. But the other three
packets would probably grow, so I fi lled containers with dirt, poked holes in the soil and dropped a seed in each one. Since I was going through the
eff ort of planting other seeds, I decided to give one lettuce a try. It was so small. T ey all were. How could any of them grow into any- thing we could actually eat? And that poor lettuce? Forget it. I watered the seeds every morn-
ing. Days went by and nothing happened. A week passed and doubt crept in. Was this going to work? I was already cranky with God about our fi nances and became even crankier as my garden failed to sprout. But there was nothing I
That lettuce was a
miracle growing right before my eyes.
The whole garden was.
ELIZABETH BIRKHOLZ
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