Sunday afternoon I left my husband with seed packets of
Zinnias and Dahlias and walked up, across the yard, to look for a spade in our
overflowing garage.  The planting of
those flowers, four packets, was what I requested for Mother’s Day this
year. 

I don’t know why planting seems, for me, an impossible
task.  Maybe it’s that simple act of
letting go and watching the impossible seed fall into darkness; maybe it’s the
familiar struggle of facing an unknown future. 
Whatever it is, my husband plants the garden each year and I, in time,
tend it. 

Walking up from the garden, across the green expanse of
lawn, I looked over at our neighbor’s yard. 
They have a small, fenced in, vegetable garden and the wife, Ann, has a
separate flower garden.  Their garden,
like most in early spring, is a miracle waiting to happen – a tilled expanse of
soil, a pregnant pause.  My eyes saw the
emptiness there, the open waiting space, but in my mind I remembered the
Zinnias. 

During our first summer here, we planted a good-sized
vegetable garden filled with the practical means of nutrition.  Our neighbors did the same in their fenced-in
plot, but around the outside edge of the fence grew large, splashy, red, purple
and pink flowers – a fiesta of color that started blooming in late summer and
stood strong into the fall. 

Oh how I envied Miss. Ann’s Zinnias.  I eyed
her flowers hungrily and finally, in September as the flowers were beginning to
fade, asked if I might over and cut a bunch.  From that moment on, I was hooked. 

The following summer, I bought a packet of seeds and grew my
own riot of reds and pinks.  I cut them
and filled our house with vases.  I
carried them to friends’ houses. 
Everyone loved the Zinnias.

Then, last year, we made a farm stand for selling fresh,
free-range chicken eggs.  I again planted
my Zinnias (or rather, my husband did) and, when they grew and bloomed, I
started cutting large happy bunches of purples and pinks, oranges and yellows
and selling them in old tin cans at the farm stand for $1 each. 

It was a real steal for fresh cut flowers and they flew off
of the farm stand’s two tilted shelves. 
A friend suggested I should charge more. 
But I refrained. 

I was already making a profit, but, what’s more, I know what
it’s like to not be able to afford fresh flowers.  I know, also, how beauty feeds the soul.  I also know the feeling of finding a
wonderful deal, how it opens our hearts and minds, makes us feel the expansive
mystery of goodness and provision in the world that’s so often buried in layer
after layer of unmet need. 

I wanted people to feel what I felt in my garden, the
sensation of wonder and delight, the absurdity of so much color available for
mere ornamentation.  

Returning to the garden with the trowel in hand that Sunday
afternoon, I thought, the kingdom of God is like those Zinnias.  The Kingdom of God – heaven in our midst –
blazes and waves in the place where it is planted.  It attracts the eye, captures the heart,
fills those who are awake enough to notice, with longing.  The Kingdom of God is like a packet of seeds,
bought for $1.49, that yields one hundred fold. 
The kingdom of God is color cut and watered in an old tin can, bright
joy on the side of the road bought with a handful of change – a deal too good
to be true.