What the Garden Teaches

The garden does not hurry. This is the first thing it teaches.

The seed does not apologize for the long dark weeks underground, for the absence of visible progress, for arriving in its own time rather than yours.

The gardener learns patience or learns nothing at all.

The second thing the garden teaches: things die so other things can grow. The spent blossom falls to make room for the fruit. The frost comes for a reason even when the reason is not visible from inside the warmth of the house.

And the third: beauty is not efficient. The rose did not need to smell like that. The sunset did not need those colors. The hummingbird was not required to hover with such impossible precision.

God made beauty for the sheer pleasure of it. And that tells us something about the kind of God He is.