What Is in the Cluster?

Lately, my mind is on the looming possibility that my little family might soon have to migrate.  We may have to leave this place we've called home (longer than any place we've lived as a family) and adapt to life in a new place.  It was a thing on my mind as I watered my flowers this morning.  It's on my mind again as I read the next flash-back journal entry.  With the flowers, the thoughts circled around this flower in particular:

It blooms valiantly, but it is severely stunted--mainly because I failed to transplant it in a timely fashion.  Instead, I let its roots get all bound up in a black plastic dixie cup, turning what should have been a towering 6 ft sunflower into this 6 inch miniature, not even as tall as the shortest of the bachelor's buttons blooming just a few feet down in the flower parade.  I think about yesterday's posting about God's timing vs. man's, and I think of how I failed this little one; but I also think larger things about space even as I did before about time.  Am I root bound somehow, too?  Is there a way I should be a statuesque tower of gold and instead have resigned myself to being a warped little daisy-ish thing? 

And then, I went on to the reading and saw this:

June 25, 2005

"He went out not knowing whether he went." Hebrews 11:8

Oswald Chambers says of this verse:  "You have to learn to go out of convictions, out of creeds, out of experiences, until so far as your faith is concerned, there is nothing between yourself and God."  

I watch my spouse and a friend of his toss around ideas and it reminds me of this sort of going out--exploring the taste of new convictions, new creeds, new experiences.  But my husband hesitates in it.  He jokingly says his religion is "No" right now--at least where it comes to discussing such things. But I think of Proverbs 27:17:  "As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend."  It is difficult for my husband to find a sharpening iron to match his own.  I pray for that.  Strip away all that might break rather than sharpen what is in the hearts of these men, God!

June 26

I'm still thinking about what Jesus had to say about faith.  Here's another one: "Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move."

It's a lot like the  other 'move a mountain' verse I considered earlier, only now I'm concentrating more on the mustard seed part of the verse.  Many people are confounded and/or guilt-ridden by this verse as they see it saying, "What's wrong with you?  If you only had the tiniest faith--like this itty-bitty seed--why, you could move mountains!  You're not even getting a good gravel slide started!"  Or at least, this verse has hit me that way.  But now, I'm seeing something different.  I'm not just seeing a commentary on size.  I'm seeing a commentary on potential.  Again, that timing thing.  This mustard seed has phenomenal potential for change.  It will become a huge plant...eventually--become something very different from how it starts. That's what has the power to move mountains! 

I see the same idea in Isaiah 65:8 "Thus says the Lord,'As the new wine is found in the cluster, and one says do not destroy it for a blessing is in it,' so I will do for my servants' sake, that I might not destroy them all."  The cluster promises to be wine to the eye that can see beyond the moment, but the servant must see, and the servant must raise a comment to God about it.  And that is faith.

I think again about my little flower.  It will never create a seed.  It will never produce another generation of its own kind.  I am sad because I took that from it.  But what a gift of hope it offers in that it bloomed anyway!  This is the lesson in the end for me, I think. 

Back when I wrote those journal entries, I was learning something of God.  I learned it much like I'd peel an onion.  I pulled back a dead, inedible layer and looked beneath, and there I learned to embrace faith as a thing that believes large truths about metamorphosis instead of small lies about failure. I learned that even the tiniest seed in the hand can become something quite powerful when planted.

But today, I peeled another layer on that onion, the layer finally deep enough to bring the tears to spill.  I turned the bulb in my hands, slid my fingertips along it's inner tenderness--like a baby's downy head, it was.  Oh, I know that the "greatest of these is love," as the letter-writer tells us; but today I learned to take the hand of faith and join it to the hand of hope--those runners-up in the great three.  And with these two standing by, I was able to honor a simple, barely noticeable sort of glory.  I had to kneel to see it, but it was there--shining through a stunted little flower that even without a future, and even if only for a day would decide to nonetheless bloom anyway!