HappyMama

I have a beautiful image to include with this post, but I can’t figure out how to load it.  Was extremely simple to load jpgs with blogger… anyway, it shows two hands cupping together a mound of dirt, and growing out of the dirt, a tiny seedling.

A while back, I joined the Arbor Day Foundation and received 11 free saplings in the mail.  Unfortunately, they arrived about the same time as our 3rd child, and subsequently got tossed into the garage, where I hoped they would stay cold enough to survive until I got around to heeling them in somewhere.  Although the package clearly and repeatedly says, “open immediately!  plant immediately!” it was at least 2 weeks before I even remembered they were out there.  When I finally got around to opening the package, how disheartening to see nothing but 11 small, skinny sticks with a few little root hairs.  They were either dormant or dead.  Not expecting much, I planted all of them into one big pot, used some quality potting soil, and kept them watered well for 2 more weeks.  My husband liked to joke, “what nice sticks we’re growing!”

Imagine my amazement, then, when one day I noticed a tiny red bud leaf on one of the “sticks”!  And since that day, numerous leaves have grown on 7 others, and I have repotted them to continue growing until spring.  Amazing.  These seemingly dead “sticks” might someday be 30 feet tall, providing shade for even my very tall husband, and home to all sorts of little creatures. 

Recently I was listening to a talk by Johnnette Benkovic.  She used the word “dormant” to describe the faith of a baptized person who is not living a Christian life.  Immediately I thought of my little trees, and finally had the image I’ve been searching for to understand better the nature of faith.  I’ve long believed that faith is a gift from God.  And we believe that we receive this gift at the moment of baptism.  Yet, we all know people who were baptized but are clearly not living lives of faith.  There were long periods of my own life where it seemed all but impossible to believe in the existence of anything supernatural.  If faith is a gift, then why the struggle?  Because faith is alive, like my saplings, and must be nurtured in order to grow.  When we see a baptized person not living like a Christian, it is because his faith is dormant.  Faith grows in the soil of prayer (our own and that of others,) and with the “water” of the sacraments and the Scriptures.

I love nurturing plants, but infinitely more important than that is nurturing the faith of my children.  The growth of their faith isn’t clearly as evident as in my plants… how nice if we could somehow “measure” their spiritual progress!  Aren’t we so much more complicated than that, however.  Nurturing is what parents do.  With every act of discipline and every act of kindness, with every minute of wrestling and storytelling and diaper changing, we are nurturing our little ones, and praying that God will grow our little saints.