Digging Potatoes

"So. We're not giving up.  How could we!  Even though, on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without His unfolding grace.  These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us.  There's far more here than meets the eye.  The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow.  But (there's that "But God" thing again).....But the things we can't see now?  Will last forever."  2 Corinthians 4, The Message

I grabbed my Comfort this morning and started reading and stopped right here.  He'd put Himself right in the middle of my potato field.  His finger lay on the pulse of my life.  This.... this was what was breathing in and out of me the past several days.  This was the "loss" I'd been feeling.  This was the perspective that I'd gotten stuck in....the "giving up" part, the "things we see now" stuff.  I was gathering up the pieces I'd planted these past several months as the owner of the field slipped reckless on the peelings to run away,  the explosion of little potato bits sticking to my heart and the ground in front of me, and leaving the grace on the floor.  His grace.

I thrive in the eternal, the business of breathing new Life into people's hearts and lungs.  I can cut and paste with a three year old happy, I can wrestle silly with a teenage boy, I can drink three cups of coffee with a friend of long years and laugh over nothing content when I know that the gardening is eternal.  When it matters.  And, these past several months?  I'm in a choppy field that I walked head first into without flinching.  Because it mattered.  It matters still.

But this morning.  The Maker of potatoes (as an aside, I always think of Dan Quayle when I type that word) and the Harvester of seeds planted, reminds me not to give up.  That He has purpose that I don't see coming.  That He is making new life where, from where I stand in the field, now pushed back to the side, seems like an empty wind blowing.

There's far more here than meets the eye.  I'm trusting the Eternal unseen is still working.  And not giving up in my heart.