2,000 Dollars & Hours (not related to gardening!)

Tape your business card to the back of your laptop. 

Today I left my laptop inside the seatback pocket of my airline seat. I didn't realize it until I was driving away from the airport. Oh how my heart skipped. Such a big airport. What if the plane takes off, with my little mac still in the seat? Ugh.
As I run into the door to get a pass to go back through security, my phone rings. A gate agent has my mac and is saving it for me at gate K7. They called because my cell phone number was right there. They said in all the years they worked at the gate and all the many laptops left, this was the first with id information.

Speaking of Fruit

For all the fun I've had with composting, the surprise potatoes and the accidental beginning of all this gardening, I learned a little too late last year about coffee. My house has become something of a coffee laboratory. There has been a lot of coffee grounds in the wake. Last year I was flinging them all over.  Until I read up on possible reasons why my tomatoes weren't blooming. Coffee has a lot of nitrogen, and while that is mostly good, it can inhibit the tomato/ pepper family from blooming.
All week I've been thinking about weeding and gardening and how similar those things are to church. The difference, says the Jesus parable, is the fruit. You'll know if it's a weed by its fruit.  The fruit is the key to what that plant produces and reproduces.
What if it never even blooms? No blooms, no fruit.What keeps us from blooming? We see a lot of reasons why folks don't bloom; abuse, neglect, abandonment, lack of resources.
Kids are so resilient though. A little coffee wouldn't stop the blooming. They'll bloom anyway. They'll be strong, something like fertilizer. But too much, stops the process.   
The challenge I think, is once a plant doesn't bloom. The soil is all wrong. How can a gardener provide the conditions for blooming next season and coax the blooms? Can the soil be balanced to get things back on track? Can a life be balanced back to blooming?

Weeding is a Part of Gardening

The Bible is chock full of gardening imagery. It starts in the garden of Eden for crying out loud. The "New" testament is full of great parables that include harvests and workers and such. Anyone who has even tried some gardening knows that there are weeds, weeds that need to be pulled. There is a great parable (Matthew 13:29-31) of the master of the vineyard decides to let the weeds grow with the grain and it'll be figured out in the end. It's not a very popular parable, not one I learned in Sunday school. 
It ends up being all about fruit.  We'll know if it's a weed or not by it's fruit.  There's a groovy tune left from the Hippy Jesus movement- "and they'll know we are Christians by our love." 
Or not.  Seems like an awful lot of weeds in some churches.