The Pastor’s Piece – July 28, 2024

The Pastor’s piece

FCFI

July 28, 2024

Summer days and summer nights are a thing to behold. I think if one only gets their groceries from the store, they lose a little of the awe of God’s Creation in watching their food grow. Every year, I stand amazed at how you can put a seemingly dead seed in the ground, cover it with dirt, and it grows and produces fruit. I say seemingly dead, because it only looks dead. There is life inside that seed waiting to grow when it is given the right conditions. Every year I prepare the seedbed for my wife’s garden. She carefully comes up with a plan for the garden, then lays out the rows. She plants the usual green beans, lettuce, zucchini, carrots, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and such. We have a separate pumpkin and watermelon patch. She always plants a row of giant sunflowers. As a special bonus, she will plant something we don’t usually plant – like one year it was brussel sprouts. Another year it was beets. This year it is turnips. There’s always a row of marigolds in the middle of the garden to ward off the bugs. 

It never ceases to be exciting when the seeds first start to pop up out of the ground. Then when the vegetables are table-ready, there’s a little extra excitement involved when you eat them for the first time. When the first tomato ripens, that is cause for celebration. This year, our watermelon patch is in a planter that sits on the edge of a concrete slab. We had a bit of difficulty getting the melons started. I planted them three times before we finally had seedlings that survived. We had a similar problem with the pumpkins. The birds seem to love to eat young watermelon and pumpkin seedlings. They would sprout and grow only to be devoured by something. At one point, after a struggle to get it started, we had one pumpkin plant that was finally growing and was about to begin vining out, when something cut it off at the root. Like a beaver chewing through a tree, whatever this pumpkin-plant-predator was, it gnawed the plant off right where it came out of the ground. So, we had to start over. 

Pumpkins and watermelons are the funnest of all garden produce. They grow huge and at first they hide themselves among the expanding vines. Then when you spot the first tiny bubble on the vine, it’s pure joy to watch it grow after that. After the slow start this year, I read the label on the seed package, and we should make it just under the wire for maturity as long as we don’t have an early frost.

That reminds me of the story of the gardener who, one year, had the nicest watermelon patch he’d ever had. Apparently, other people thought the same because when the melons were ready to eat, they began disappearing from his garden at night. So, he devised a plan to obstruct the thieves. He put a sign in his melon patch that said: “Caution – one of these melons has been injected with cyanide.” Feeling confident, he went to bed that night expecting no more thievery. But to his dismay, the next morning, he noticed the watermelon thieves had crossed out the word “one” on his sign and changed it to “two.” 

Each week, we quietly gather together in our church sanctuary and pray for whatever is on our hearts. We don’t take prayer requests or make lists – we do that under a different venue. On these nights, we simply bow our heads, young and old alike and pray and offer praise to God. After our prayer time, we eat together and then study the Bible. After Bible study, some of us hang around for a time chatting, telling stories, catching up on each other’s lives, and laughing a lot. 

On one of our prayer nights, a three year old boy came up to me afterward and said: “Pastor Kevin, what did you do today?” And then he stood there and listened intently while I gave him a rundown of my day’s activities. Then I asked him about his day, and he went into great detail and covered the events of a day in the life of a three year old. It was a sweet exchange. 

Later, I asked one of our young men who is in his 20’s the same question and he told me he had gotten hit on his motorcycle by a city bus in Madison, Wisconsin! I was not expecting that reply. Apparently the bus driver didn’t see him and pulled away from the curb and the cyclist could not stop. He said all he remembers is hitting the side of the bus then waking up in the hospital later. I asked him if the incident was recorded? He said it was recorded on the street camera above the stoplight. I then asked if he had heard from any attorneys? He chuckled and said he’d heard from lots of attorneys already.

And so, life is happening out there. If it seems mundane and boring to you, just ask someone, ask anyone: “What did you do today?” Be prepared to do some listening!

Psalm 118:24: “This is the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” He’s made this day, so let us rejoice. It infuses meaning into a day to know that God has made it. God has designs for it. He has a purpose for it. God is working in it.

(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin).