Let's talk about what happens when I go to the grocery store.

When I go to the grocery store I am inspired to cook dinner.  

We have milk in the morning and milk for the nightly bowl of cereal before bed.  

Lunches for school can be packed before we go to bed instead of delivered to school midmorning. 

I set out after school snacks instead of going to Sonic and homework gets done quicker.

I have a feeling of well being when I open the refrigerator or pantry to see that we have what we need.

I am very likely to eat lunch at home and get more done around the house. 

We have healthy choices for every meal.   

We save a great deal of money by not eating out.  

We are all much much happier. 

Let's talk about why it is mentally so difficult to get to the grocery store.

Anyone?

I planted a sweet potato vine in my cutting garden. You may already have a bad feeling in your stomach.... 

Let me explain.  

It was a new garden bed, raised, in a curve to accent the curve of my kitchen window right in the center of my backyard where I could see it from every window on the back of the house. A beautiful blank canvas of dirt, tilled and ready for me to do with whatever I wanted.  

I planted it over several days and with several trips to Martin's, cutting garden heaven on earth.  Everything about this project was bringing great joy and inspiration to my daily life.  I have always wanted a cutting garden, wild and spilling over so that I could run outside with my clippers and bring in a jumbled basket of beauty to arrange and set around the house. 

 

The problem with bringing my garden dream into reality has been that the season a garden needs to be planted is SPRING.  In our home spring requires that our family gear up for the fly by the seat of your pants systematically chaotic season of end of the year projects, programs, history fair, AAU basketball, choir performances, three baseball teams, Kids Marathon, school play, and a little PCA soccer thrown in for good measure.  Therefore in the past I have tried to satisfy my cutting garden longing with clusters of pots on the patio, and I enjoyed them, but they were not the same as the garden I had imagined.  And now it was to be a reality.

          Everything was going along fine with the project until I finished planting.  I had enjoyed the process of choosing colors, textures, differing shades of foliage so much that I had even spaced my plants a bit closer than recommended so that I could squeeze in a few more choices  - maybe the same way we handle life.  But as I looked out the window, or sat on the patio, my garden was not satisfying. 

I was not content.  It looked too.... empty.  

I had zinnias in four shades, petunias, miniature roses, Black Eyed Susans and gerber daisies, several types of ground cover in pink, yellow, and lavender, salvia, a very beautiful mixture of height, color, and texture that were sure to grow into the jumbled tumbling cottage garden look that I was hoping for.  

Grow into.  Not today.  

Not tomorrow.  Growth takes time. 

But I had waited already, years for my garden. 

I wanted to enjoy it now, full and lush.

   I was already a friend of the sweet potato vine from my use of it in pots.  It is a

 unique shade of light green, large leaves which look beautiful against almost any other plant, and it is extremely fast growing.  I imagined its bright green leaves intertwined with my hot pink and yellow zinnias, curling around the base of my miniature roses and I was sold.  Actually it was sold to me, by Martin's, within the hour, just three small plants.  I didn't want to overwhelm my garden with it.  I planted it at one end of the bed and pulled its tendrils in between the baby zinnias and salvia.  It already looked much better.  Instant gratification.

And it did grow.  It was so beautiful mixed with the zinnias as they increased in number.  The other end of the garden bed lagged behind in beauty, lacking the vibrant sweet potato vine.  I has clearly made a good choice and wished I had planted more.   It heaped over the side of the bed walls, cascading onto the grass, and weaved its way toward the middle of the garden, putting down new roots, lush and green.  For weeks it multiplied, filling in the gaps.  I was away for a few weeks, vacations and such,  and was amazed at the lush green of this part of the garden on my return.  Beautiful. 

Until I looked closer.

The other end of the bed had matured.  Small pink zinnias, yellow puffy marigolds, giant orange zinnias, blue violet petunias, delicate pink and red roses.  Beautiful variations in size and color, spilling into each other, a glorious tangled mess of variety and balance just as I had dreamed.  The sweet potato vine end of the garden was looking very..... sweet potato vine green.  The voracious vine had rapidly overwhelmed every other plant nearby.  The garden at that end had dwindled to a couple of sickly looking yellow zinnia blooms, maybe one pink, and a couple of cone flowers rising up behind and a mass of sweet potato vine.  

And I did nothing.  I dreaded the task of dealing with it.  

I was irritated by its presence, irritated by my choice to put it here, dreading examining the damage that had been done.  So I let it go  a bit longer.  From far away the garden still looked green and healthy.  But I knew and I was bothered.  

I have had other sweet potato vines in my life.  

In other types of gardens.  

The garden of a new home, new school year gardens, new relationship gardens, gardens of a new season of life.  I tend to like to fill things up, with relationships, activity, plans, improvements, even beauty.  Sometimes it is hard to wait for growth and maturity.  I have planted sweet potato vines in the form of premature purchases, too many social events, commitments to projects, even Bible Studies I did not have time to devote to.  Most of these "vines" are in actuality good things when properly planted with boundaries - like the walls of a pot - room to grow without overcrowding.  But sometimes even when properly planted something in our life is left to grow too long, oversteps the season of life it belonged in, and needs to be removed. There have been beloved projects that I began, nurtured, tended and now they are healthy and ready to stand on their own or to be transplanted to the care of someone else. They are overgrown in my life and are crowding out the things God has called me to for this season.

  Finally, one day I pulled up in the driveway, saw the vine spilling out of the bed onto the lawn, and decided to at least clip it back.  As I began to clip, I found dead grass underneath, cut off from the sunlight.  I decided to pull the vine out from the roots and realized that was impossible because the vine had sent out new roots every several inches.  The ripping out turned out to be a lot more difficult that the planting,  and the damage was extensive because the roots of the vine were intertwined with the plants I wanted to keep.  I discovered withered plants underneath, damage that did not show on the surface.  When I was finished I had a very very lopsided garden, one end the picture of health and balance, the other ruins left by my impatience and lack of discretion. 

And I have been here before - facing the task of untangling an item, a commitment, a relationship from my life or whose time has passed or which never should have been planted.  Those "sweet potato vines" were sometimes planted to fill a space that would have been better left open for growth - maturity over time - in areas of beauty that I had already planted.  Other times they are just the result of the natural cycle of pruning that must be done periodically to allow growth to continue.  Either way there is pain in the removal.  

The result may be lopsided ruins for a time. 

 But only for a time.

The tattered sweet potato vine end of my garden is shaping up.  The pink and yellow strangled zinnias are sending out new buds like crazy.  The brown and withered salvia have greened up from sunlight.  The plants that belong in my garden are no longer fighting for water and nutrients due to over crowding.  Everything is maturing nicely.  So it goes in our lives.  A longtime project turned over to new hands springs to life

under a new perspective.  An activity that has run its course in our life is "retired" in order to pursue a true passion and  the passion flourishes, as does our spirit.  The effort to maintain too many surface relationships is focused on a few and those friendships deepen.  As I examine my life, and ask for eyes to see what to plant and what to remove, I find His plan to be where I flourish and am most satisfied.

Plant, prune, grow.

 

End of Summer 08, beginning of this blog

Mid August, usually marked by the anticipation of seeing school friends again, new notebooks and planners and school shoes, sadness of summer's end but a growing sense of readiness for a new beginning....  but not this year. 

Not this year.  

This year the Newman family has been thrown off the high dive of summer into the deep end of school day schedules, football, guitar, basketball, youth retreat, conditioning, papers due, meetings, choir, get up early, I need a lunch today, where are my khakis, Mom do you think this looks right, did you remember to call...., don't forget your cleats, my pads/ book/ backpack/ uniform/ money/ charger are in Dad's car, can you sign this, do you have any money, I need to be early today, hurry and eat dinner is ready and we need to go, phone ringing, can you iron this, do we have any clean socks, did you feed the dog, is Dad at work today, you really need to get to bed, are we really out of milk, I have got to turn off the Olympics and get some sleep.

How did this happen?  Did we not feel ourselves climbing up the ladder, unprepared to hit the water without our usual week or so of organizing the school uniform closet, checking off school supplies, attending pre school year meetings, buying H some new clothes, a great bag for books, stocking up on lunch making supplies, starting to gradually get up a little bit earlier each day? 

We did not feel it.

Because we were on Adventure.  

The first day of school for our boys actually happened without us. We were in the Dominican Republic on the first mission trip our entire family has taken together.  Our first day of school photo looks a little different this year... rather than posed in front of the river birch in our front yard before walking to Providence with the neighbors, we are posed in front of a Cathedral in Santo Domingo.  

Our days were filled with extraordinary experiences, some disguised as quite ordinary;

• Looking through a  photo album made for Alexander, who David sponsors through Compassion International, after meeting him for the very first time.
• Waving to the Dominican people, seeing their delighted smiles in their homes, on their "porches", in the street as our bus passed them each day on the way to and from our work site
• Playing baseball in the street with a broomstick and a "limon" with beautiful and brave Dominican boys
• Eating a mango or avocado at our lunch break offered to us by the same little boys
• Working harder than we have ever worked in our lives ... mixing, carrying, pouring cement and laying cement block - the walls of a church for a people who have prayed for God to provide a "temple" for Him for 13 years
• Laughing with and loving amazing
• little children, hundreds of them, who poured their love into us... singing, playing, helping, giving.... how could we be the same?
• Taking in the beauty of a country, the beauty of the stars from a flat rooftop in the pitch black darkness of the middle of nowhere, and the beauty of unhurried conversation
• Relishing the satisfying simplicity of having only what we need - very hard work, water, food (that could not have tasted better enjoyed together as a family), rest, worship and God's word.  
• Arriving unannounced to the door of a Dominican home, being invited in, made comfortable at the expense of the inhabitants, praying with Delia, Megellena, Anna Clara, Beinbenito
• Witnessing firsthand the beauty of the church, the magnitude of God, the glory of His creation, the satisfaction of service, the miracle and privilege of being a part of God's provision, the bounty of His blessings, the sweetness of fellowship with and unprecedented growth within our family

We did not feel the climb up to the dive off into the over filled schedule of our regular lives. But we did feel the plunge into, the under the water feeling, and the effort to kick to the surface. We have looked around and have begun to swim.  We are getting into a rhythm again.  

But it is not the same.  

The things that made us worry and fret and rush to the phone or off to the store to fix it.... don't seem that urgent.  The "got to be there, can't miss that, work harder, add more, reach higher" tendency in our lives has lost much of its pull.  No thank you is flowing much more freely.  I am free to read that book, sit down for dinner, resign from that obligation, make do with the ___ we already have, enjoy my time with you, let go of this pile of things, really see people, free ourselves for the experiences God has for us, for the best possible experience with Him.  Not perfectly, not even consistently, but it is there, for all six of us, increasingly.  The adventure was more than worth the subsequent plunge, and we can't wait to go again.  And again.  And again.     

 Just go.