…If Donna Purdy picked a peck of pickled peppers, where are the pickled peppers that Donna Purdy picked? With apologies to John Harris’ Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, I’ve been thinking about this childhood tongue twister in a new way. Because I can tell you; that peck is in the refrigerator in a series of ball jars. Boy, are they tasty, too.  

We have had hit or miss success with vegetable gardening here in southeast. We don’t have a lot of sunlight in our yard to work with, and irrigation has been a problem at times. Mainly it’s been the heat and learning what we can get to grow and when. Sometimes there are pleasant surprises, like the cherry tomato plant that produced regularly for two seasons, including random tomatoes out of season during a mild winter. This year it’s been the banana pepper plant that survived the summer without anyone to water it, while we were traveling.  

It’s a nice surprise, to be sure. We often seem to wait for harvests, remembering the promise of trees that “bear fruit in due season,” as the psalmist says. It’s an expectation that life won’t always be abundant, right? We will have dormant seasons and seasons of abundance. Which makes fruit outside of the due season a true gift. Fruit where and when we didn’t expect it, is something special, even if it’s “just” a pepper. 

I am also thankful for the times that I find unexpected fruit in my life; gifts from God in unforeseen places and at times I never anticipated. Some moments are certainly challenging, and yet it’s rare that every challenging moment is only challenge. Grace and love can slowly break through the surface of an experience that seemed barren and dead. The Spirit, despite my lack of tending and care, can shower me with life and growth as only the work of  a master gardener can manage. Christ, the one who can whisper and make things new again, can whisper into the storms of my life and bring calm and peace.  

If God is good and graciously grants gifts of love and grace, where are the grace and love that God graciously gifts? All over, as it turns out. They are plain and perfect when I pay attention.

Tom+

Lord whose love is never-ending and whose promises to us are full of hope, refresh us in times of tiredness and renew us in moments of despair, that we may learn to see our lives with the fullness of your vision, where cheerfulness and sorrow, anger and excitement, complaint and praise, are enfolded in the arms of one-all-encompassing love, in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

~ From The Canterbury Book of New Parish Prayers

Photo Credits: Banana Peppers by Rahul Dsilva, and Cherry Tree by Bernd Schmidt, via subscription to Dreamstime.com