To Everything there is a Season, a time for planting seeds 

                By Barb Alston, Melita Presbyterian Church 

Every day we seem to get into conversations about the weather. It is no surprise as being part of an agriculturally based community; we are so affected in our everyday lives by it. 

As everyone knows, gradually, the season is changing, though we wondered over the past week-end with the return of a cover of heavy wet snow. Perhaps the birds that have returned, or are passing through, like the junco’s - are wondering too!

But in true gardener’s fashion, it only made me more determined to accomplish some of my gardening tasks. Six different kinds of tomatoes are planted in my containers, carefully placed on the south-facing window-sill. The green pepper plants are under the grow light.  These are my indoor seeding projects in preparation for the outdoor garden. If I am organized enough, I may later get some cucumbers and pumpkins started in the house before the soil is warm enough for them to grow outside. We may do a lot of gardening in our minds before the actual tasks are accomplished. Planting seeds; what a hopeful thing to do .

This indeed is a season of hope.

I remember when my Dad many years ago was sick in the hospital. In the last few years of his life he had the privilege to be a farmer, something he had always dreamed of — one thing I did, to give him something to watch, something to hope in — was to give him a bright yellow flower pot — in which I had planted soybean seeds — one of his crops—and he got to see them sprout and grow, in the window.

Those of us who garden, are always working with plants, if we are able to at all. We water and tend and repot our house-plants and start our seeds on the window- sill containers. Some are more serious, or maybe have a business. I like to think of how many seeds are growing in area green-houses — and how much transplanting is going on. 

Seeds remind us that no matter what else is going on in us, in our lives, or in our communities and world, there is tremendous hope.

We have just celebrated Easter — a time when darkness and despair gave way to light and to joy, a time when death gave way to new life and resurrection!

My prayer for everyone is that you would be able to find the hope and joy in your daily living — even amidst the struggles. Think of the image of the growing seed — the root growing down, the shoot and leaves going up and breaking through the ground into the sunshine!

What an inspiration we find in the miracle of the tiny , growing seed.

I will conclude today with the words of the last verse from the song: “The Rose” (words written by Amanda McBroom)

When the night has been too lonely
And the road has been too long,
And you think that love is only
For the lucky and the strong,
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun's love
In the spring becomes the rose.