Warm spring breezes scented with lilacs have gently, but with determination, blown the  cold winds of winter far, far away.  I love spring, greens in every shade imaginable sprout forth from the brown of tree limbs and dirt.  I imagine beautiful veggies growing in my garden, untouched by bugs and yellowed leaves.  Maybe it’s the scent of the lilacs or the fresh cut grass, or the combination of both with just the perfect amount of warm sunshine that causes me to dream of a garden much bigger than I need.  I made plans for the perfect garden which included the skills of my husband, who makes use of his testosterone by skillfully weilding manly tools like drills and staple guns and carrying the heavy stuff.  

A couple of weeks ago we started our garden project.  We popped up the pop-up green house, Brett put together the raised beds stored in the shed and I filled them with dirt, manure, and compost.  But, my plants still sat in the green house waiting for us to find the spare time to put up a short chicken wire fence to keep Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy and Topsy out of the garden.  The little cottontails are adorably cute hopping around the yard, but I am a little selfish and  do not want to share my lettuce with the neighborhood bunnies.    

Brett and I went to Lowes and after much pushing the cart up and down the ailes, and doing more math than we’ve done since graduating from highschool, we finally determined the various prices of different types of wood in the amount that we needed.  We settled on the cheapest stuff we could find, had it cut to the appropriate length and left the store with grand visions of our new fence.  

Brett pulled into the parking space in the back of the house and unloaded the lumber.  For all our planning the actual building of the fence went up with one new idea at a time.  We decided to attatch the wood to the lined up boxes.  I held the wood while Brett operated the drill and buzzed the screws into the wood.   The last peice of wood in place we stood back to admire our work.  Most of the peices were straight, but several were decidedly crooked.  How could we have not seen they weren’t staight up and down?  Brett reversed the process and drilled the screws out of the wood.  This time he held up the wood and I stood at a distance to tell him when it was staight.  

We finished one section of the garden and decided to move onto the second section to be fenced.  After putting a few boards up in the second section, Brett stood up and glanced over at the first section, no doubt to admire the results of his hard work.  He noticed the long boards we had attatched to use as trellis’s for the tomatoes and cucumbers looked as though they could use more support.  We took a few of the longer boards and attatched one of them horizontially across three of the vertical boards.  Having begun the new project without a real plan of how it would look when finished we tried the second board in a few places before attatching it.   So far, so good.  But, what next?  We were quickly using up the boards we had bought for the second section of fence.  We attatched a couple of boards diagonally and had one small board left to attatch.  Wanting to attatch it in just the right spot and straight rather than crooked, we had learned from our previous mistakes, I stood back and told Brett to move the board to various places trying to get it “just right”.  It dawned on me that if he attatched it in the middle of the other two boards we would have a capitol “H”, perfect as the first letter of our last name.  

Brett posted photos to Facebook of our finished garden fence with the letter “H” in the center.  A friend used the word “clever” to describe our fence.  She didn’t know we hadn’t planned it that way, we just took one step at a time and arrived to the perfect ending.  

In the middle of building the fence I told Brett I would use the story as an example of our relationship with God.  First of all there are many times we think we know what we are doing and have no idea the boards of our life are going on crooked.  We see the situation up close, God sees the whole picture from a distance.  Just like I stood back and gave Brett directions to place the board straight, only God can help us get the direction of our lives straight.   Brett and I haphazardly put the fence up, making up the next thing to do as we went along.  At one point we thought we were finished, but then realized we needed to make the trellis’s more stable.  We randomly started putting up wood and somehow or other ended up with the first letter of our last name in the middle of the fence.  

When we follow God, we only need to know the next right thing to do.  Brett and I made it up as we went along, God doesn’t.  He has a plan and in the end, if we follow him one right action after the other, we will end up with the perfect ending.  We seemingly haphazardly ended up with our name represented by a capitol “H”  in the middle of our new garden fence, but God’s plan for us isn’t haphazard.  He knew our name from the beginning of time and planned for us to be in His family.  Now when I see our garden fence, I am reminded that just like I pre-planned my garden, God pre-planned us being here.  He has planted us in his garden and just like I envision beautiful plants bearing much fruit, God envisions me growing in His garden and bearing much fruit for Him.