God sends completely unexpected encouragements in the middle of discouraging messes. 🙂

I haven’t posted to this site for weeks, because my computer crashed and took down with it my wifi, dedicated external hard drives, and network. I tried to fix it, and so did experts, and whenever I just couldn’t deal with it anymore, I gardened: I planted 90 onion sets, rows of four kinds of peppers, two kinds of tomatoes, yellow squash, zucchini, five kinds of herbs, strawberries; a bodacious salad garden of three kinds of lettuce, four kinds of greens, cauliflower and broccoli; and a flower garden of three different heights of zinnias, just like the one that was so spectacular all along the fence last year. Planting two gardens full of so much promise was very hopeful and therapeutic.

Then my husband and I needed to take a trip 600 miles from home for a week. Back home the rains had come and the sun was hot, and I just knew my garden was thriving. Then we had car trouble and our return was delayed almost another week. In June. When the sun is hot and the rains come.

When we got back home, my gardens were lush and green, but only because one particular weed had virtually carpeted them both and grown to about 18″ tall. I had to part paths in the vegetation to find the squash and zucchini plants that had emerged from the seeds I had planted. The shade-loving lettuce was thriving under the umbrellas the weeds formed. The zinnias? Not so much (See photo above). From hundreds of seeds, there were only a few spindly little sprouts a few inches tall.

But when I started clearing those weeds from around the rows of onions down the middle of my vegetable garden, look what was there–one perfect, fully grown zinnia, blooming like crazy! 

We might have good ambitions and plans and execute them nearly perfectly, laying the groundwork for future outcomes. Then even while we’re doing good works, the plans might seem to be
overrun by things that are undesirable and out of our control. The exact plan we had anticipated so eagerly is overwhelmed, overruled, dwarfed, minimized, or even dead.

Maybe God just intended for that particular dream to be planted and growing all by itself, in a little different setting with others not one bit like itself, where it can really shine, like my zinnia in the row of onions. He can do that. Sometimes we just have to leave things alone for a little while and allow ourselves to be pleasantly surprised.