gardening for dummies 101

I figured I need to explain myself...all this gardening, people will be wondering if I'm having a midlife crisis. I actually come from a family of Gardeners. As kids my brother and I had gardening diaries. Our grandparents had a small section of their mammoth garden for Rik and I to plant seeds and to help them grow. We were responsible for the care and maintanence of the garden. Sometimes I wish I still had that diary somewhere (I'm sure I could use the refresher course).

So here I am all these years later attempting to garden again. So far I have built and planted 2 raised gardens, made a stoned garden and today I have planted tires full of cucumber and zuchinni. I think Im almost done with the gardening for this year.

All I have left to do is to plant my potatoes in tires and sit back and enjoy the fruit (or veges) of my labour.....in a varying number of weeks time.

a phantom, an opera, an accident & the kingdom

I went to see Phantom of the Opera last night with friends and work colleagues. We made the trip from Hamilton to Auckland in a "Go bus!"...I think they are named that cos at best you can hope that the bus will live up to its name and actually go!

Our seats were as far back as you could get, literally. We had the back wall of the theatre behind us. I felt like I was up in the clouds somewhere looking down on these little people below. For the most part it was a great show...until the scenes where they were on high staging and then at best we could see their lower legs and feet, at worst, nothing.

Coming home in the go bus was an adventure all in itself. There was a "woah" from our driver, followed by the braking of the bus, the gasping of those who could see what happened and the sound of the rain continuing to fall. A man ahead of us had drifted to the left and then spun around to face us but not before slamming into the wire lane guard that separates southbound & northbound traffic. Now I'm never one to just sit in the car when there has been an accident. I prefer to find some way of helping...even if it is just clearing the road of the debris or holding an umbrella over the driver as we waited for the police & ambulance. He was Chinese and unfortunately didn't really speak english. In my best 'intercultural sign language and gestures" I managed to figure out that he lived in Auckland and has family there. He got a bit of a shock when he hit the rail and something about lights shining in his eyes before he hit it....oh and he wasn't injured.

After a lengthy wait for the police & emergency services (lengthy only because of the time of night, the weather conditions and my heels & fishnets not being the warmest) we headed on our way home, leaving the man, his car and the situation behind us.

I was thinking about it and thought "Lord, what more could I have done for this man?" It was so frustrating not being able to communicate clearly with him, to provide him with any sort of real comfort or assurance, or simply connect with him beyond our primative 'conversation'. I imagined what the kingdom would look like... if I'd had the sense to pray I wonder if for that moment in time the Holy Spirit could have enabled me to speak & understand chinese..... to have been able to pray for him and talk to him about Jesus.

I have a bit of a simple faith that believes that stuff like that is totally possible in the kingdom. If people can be healed of disease or raised from the dead, if people can speak in tongues not their own, why couldnt the Holy Spirit work as a translator in that moment. My mind doesn't understand it all, my spirit is still hungering after it and I wonder if like my view at the Phantom, sometimes my view of the kingdom is obscured because of the distance I place in my life. Am I hanging around the edges of the Kingdom, not wanting to jump headfirst in, choosing instead to settle with a toe, or even just looking at what others are up to?

My prayer last night was "Lord next time, I want to pray and ask for Heaven to Invade earth, for your kingdom come...and I want to do that in the moment, not as a reflection after the event."\