A Glimpse of Hope
A couple of weeks ago my Shiloh partner, Carol, pulled me aside and with excitement she asked, “Have you seen the tomato plant?”
“What tomato plant?” I had sold a handful of Shiloh’s own home grown tomato plants to family members, so I couldn’t imagine that was what she was referring to.
“The one growing out o
f the tree stump!” She began escorting me to the old tree stump in the corner of the parking lot. Low and behold, there it was, a tomato plant growing from the rotting log! I bent down to inspect it, and considered how it might have taken root there. Bird droppings? Carried in by the wind? Or perhaps a sneaky gardener? None seemed truly plausible, and yet, there it was.
Later I reflected on such an unlikely site for something to thrive. It reminded me of a trip my husband and I once took. We came across a lava flow in Oklahoma, a fascinating landscape of black volcanic folds blanketing the ground for miles. We walked among the uneven trails and tried to imagine what it had been like when the lava was molten and flowing over this land, cooking and covering everything in it’s path. Devastating comes to mind. But then, sprouting up through the hardened surface, emerged a small tree, equipped with tiny, green leaves. An unlikely sign of hope, life does go on.
Hope sometimes springs up in the unlikeliest of places. A small financial windfall (donation) for Shiloh comes as a side blessing from the hand of a celebrity and a major corporation; a woman struggling to be reunited with her children has a dream in which an angel tells her “all is well, you are not alone”; a grieving mother randomly comes across a greeting card in a shop bearing a message she so needed to hear in that moment; a friend with a debilitating disease hears the heartbreaking concern of her true love, and decides that she may have this disease, but it doesn’t have her. She once again finds the strength to fight for her life.
When we are suffering from discouragement it’s often tempting to look for hope in the most obvious of places. Maybe if we release our expectations about where we may find it, hope may spring up and surprise us in the most unlikely of ways. <3
“But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we eagerly wait for it.” Romans 8:25
Cher said,
June 7, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Cindy, this is exactly what I needed to read this morning. Thank God for the gift you have with words. Thank God for the gift of technology and the internet so you can share them with someone so far away. Thank God for YOU!.