Plants and Prayers, Faith and Works

We think it’s important to plant a garden. There’s something very fulfilling about planting a seed, having a bit of hope and faith that it will grow, and then caring for it with water, etc. The kids really love it too. After we planted the seeds, Elora usually prays for them to grow. It’s pretty sweet. In primary she had a lesson where she got to “plant” some black beans in a plastic bag with a wet paper towel. I totally remember doing the same thing in primary. When hers started to sprout, we planted them and… they grew! Into nice plants that made beans! Elora loves to eat her beans fresh off the plant. When we were planting the seeds for our garden, Elora got a hold of a few bags and was dumping them everywhere. Tomatoes in the herb pots, carrots in the green beans, etc. We thought we did a pretty good job picking up all the misplanted seeds, but we missed one tomato seed which she put in our herb pot.Naturally, the seed which Elora planted grew the best. This one tomato plant started growing really huge. It was growing straight, and strong. One day, this thought occurred to me that I should brace it up with some kind of support. I thought, “Oh ya, with how am I gonna do that in my apartment…it’s not like I could fit a tomato cage in here”. Well that thought was one I should have acted on, because one day, I walked in the kitchen and Elora’s prized tomato plant was cracked completely in half and just connected by a tiny thread. I felt really bad and figured I’d do what I could to fix it, so I wrapped in in some cloth, a little bit of tape, and then braced it with a straight piece of plastic tubing I found. Then we decided this would be a good chance to make an object lesson out of prayer for Elora. God listens to our prayers, and has the power to do all things, but that doesn’t mean He will. So we prayed with Elora and asked God if it was his will for the plant to start growing again. We had faith the plant could certainly recover, but also thought this experience an opportunity to explain sometimes our prayers are not answered in the way we expect. Of course, as you can expect the plant continued to grow. So tall it started pushing up into the ceiling! Once again I had a thought I should add some more supports, and this time I acted on it. But even still, a few days later the plant was so tall it tipped over again. It was not cracked like last time, just bent with one of the branches torn off.So we added some more supports, and wires in a few places to help contain it. And it continued to grow!