the red one

A few months back I started some geranium cuttings in a pot in my room. To have something blooming through the winter. The white and pink ones did well, and are now big and producing flowers, but the red one struggled. It started to grow and even managed a flower, then stalled. Maybe something wrong with the roots. All but two leaves yellowed and fell off, and the last two got limp and dark and a bit withered. I almost pulled it up. But it was still green, so I left it.

For over a month it didn't grow, just stayed limp and withered. But it didn't completely die either. Then this weekend, just when I was ready to give up on it to make room for the other big ones, it started growing again. A tiny new bright green leaf is emerging.

I'm happy. And it somehow seems to illustrate what I was saying about waiting for people. It reminded me of this parable:

A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, "See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?"

He replied, "Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down." (Lk 13.6-9)

But I'm not sure what the message is, exactly. God is patient, and waits for us, gives us a second chance. And we should wait for others. In the case of my geranium cutting, the waiting ended happily. But it doesn't always. And God doesn't wait forever—if that fig tree didn't bear fruit after the fertilizing, it would be cut down. Now that I think about it, there was another geranium cutting I started; that one dried up completely, and I yanked it.

Maybe the deeper message is that God is the gardener. We need to listen for his guidance and trust it. He knows when to wait for others, and what they need to encourage them to grow—and he knows when it's over. That helps, I think. It makes it easier for me to wait if I know someone knows what's going on...