A friend of ours gave us a watermelon from their garden last week. These days, most store-bought watermelons are seedless, but some garden varieties still afford the old chew-n-spit routine.
The kids saved a few of the seeds and planted them in various places around the house. My son Fletcher is old enough to realize it’s the wrong season to plant watermelons, but he still couldn’t help beaming with pride when little sproutlings began to shoot up through the soil.
It’s one of life’s miracles. Put a slippery black speck under a thin layer of dirt, and in a few days—life.
Fletcher’s infectious enthusiasm reminded me of Robert Frost’s little poem:
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
There is something intangibly hopeful about new life. It’s the sweetness of hearing a kindergartener pronounce his first words. It’s the excitement of making that first sale. It’s the enthusiasm of a church plant or a new school.
Obviously, the beginning of something is, practically speaking, nothing. A child sounding out “Dog, Fog, Log” can’t really read. A first sale doesn’t pay the bills. A church that cannot build gospel ministry and a school that fails to instruct students are both pointless. And yet, that first green? It’s gold.
It’s the ethereal nature of that first green that makes it so precious. That early leaf is a flower that passes as soon as it is seen. Inevitably, “leaf subsides to leaf” and “dawn goes down to day.” Things mature and grow into what they were meant to be.
Nothing gold can stay? For now. But a dawn is coming that will never go down to day and an hour will soon arrive when earth’s early leaf will last an eternity. On that day we will hear—
“Behold, I am making all things new.”
—Rev 21:5
A Cookbook for Green Chefs!
There’s nothing like the green of newlywed life. I remember all the new things, the new recipes, and the new kitchen rhythms. Mindy and I received a wedding edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, and we cooked almost exclusively from it for the first 5 years of our marriage.
It’s time-tested and reliable, it covers all the American staples, and many of the recipes haven’t changed since Mindy’s Grandma Fox began cooking them in the 1950s.
I just recommended it to a couple trying to get their bearings in the kitchen, and I whole-heartedly commend it to you as well!