Tomato Plant Evangelism
This spring I found a packet of tomato seeds in my desk drawer that was dated 2013. Someone had sent me the seeds in the mail as an advertisement for a survivor supply retailer. They were Heritage tomatoes of the Rutgers variety. Since my dad used to plant that kind every year, I decided to plant the seeds with very little thought that any of the "old" seeds would even sprout. I was not surprised that after a couple of weeks in the flat, I still saw nothing green.
Sometimes our hope and anticipation of things to come gives out before it should. At about the three-week point I saw a few little sprouts. I continued to water them, and to my surprise, they came up all over the flat.
I decided to transplant the small plants to bigger pots. With the application of some Miracle-Gro fertilizer and another couple of weeks, I ended up with about sixty tomato plants. After planting ten of them in our flower beds, I still had fifty, and we certainly didn’t that many for our personal use.
I’ve also been walking around the neighborhood about twice a day with our two dogs. Since we’ve been on COVID-19 lockdown there wasn’t much else to do. A lot of people in our neighborhood have been walking or riding bikes. I decided that I’d try to see how many neighbors I could meet and how many names I could learn. One of our dogs is Scooter, who has only two legs that work and has his own cart with wheels. Everybody loves Scooter. He is a great ambassador. So people talk to me as I walk frequently. I decided that I’d see how many tomato plants I could give away. I’m now down to about ten. I’ve met about twenty-plus neighbors and know their names, and all it took was a few seeds that the Lord sprouted unexpectedly, some soil and water, and a few conversations.
Someone commented to me a couple of weeks ago that the Church wasn’t closed, it has been deployed. Having 17 years of sea duty on submarines, that makes a lot of sense to me.
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