 Barked: Fri May 18, '12 5:01am PST |
 | |  | | “ We will restore them, and will require nothing of them. . . . ”
Nehemiah 5:12
Every year, the music company I worked for gave holiday gifts to its employees. Sometimes the gift was a sweatshirt with the company logo on it or a book of passes to local movie theaters or a box of food from a gourmet company. I figured that when I moved to Bellingham, Washington, we wouldn't see any more gifts, but they must have left my name on the list because that first December a box arrived from the company.
The gift inside looked like a long basket filled with sphagnum moss, but without any kind of plant or flower. The directions said to add water to it when the bulbs began to sprout. I dug around in the moss and, sure enough, there were three bulbs inside. They looked completely dead.
"They must be dormant," my husband said. "That's how bulbs work."
I was skeptical. The tulip bulbs we had bought and planted were in dirt and fertilizer, and it seemed only reasonable that they would sprout. But the bulbs in the moss in a basket with a plastic liner didn't seem to have anything to feed on or root in.
For months, the basket sat there on our kitchen windowsill. Every so often I would glance at it and resist the urge to tell Keith that nothing was happening.
Then, at the end of April, green appeared. Long, flat leaves pushed out of the moss and shot up more than a foot before they curved downward again. A stalk began to grow amid the leaves, and at its top, about the middle of May, huge pink-orange blossoms opened. From nearly nothing—and as I thought, against great odds—amaryllis appeared.
God, help me to see that Your plan includes times of growth, even when there is no visible sustenance. |  |  | |  |
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