Spring time!

It is ALMOST spring time!  By the calendar it is technically here, but the weather just has not quite caught up. The weather is at that awkward point where it is "warm" but cold all in the same day. Not quite warm enough for short sleeves, but a little too warm for long-sleeves. Plus Easter is coming, the smell of flowers is starting to fill the air, the cool weather crop seeds are planted.

I love seeing the bulbs in bloom! The snow drops have bloomed, the crocuses (which I miss because the rabbits eat mine) have blossomed, the hyacinth and daffodils are in full color! The tulips are starting to come up and the peonies (not bulbs but smell so pretty) are just surfacing. I love it!  The colors, the smells, the animals, and the resolved mystery of seeing where all the new bulbs I blindly planted in the fall are appearing in relation to the ones that have been there but I have not seen since last spring. I love adding new bulbs every year thinking how exciting it will be to see them the next spring. 

Today I was so awestruck with God's wisdom and plan in the seasons and the plants. How it is a beautiful picture of our lives; the garden through the seasons is just like our life through the years. There are certain plants that come back in the same spot in the same season every year. Perennials.  The way we we have certain values and virtues that are in us all the time. They are just part of who we are whether we trained them to be there or not. They keep coming back. They may need to be replanted at some point but they usually come back every year.

There are others that need to be replanted if we want to see any fruit each year. Annuals. That happens for some pretty flowers and in the vegetable garden. There is a chance they could have seeded themselves last year, but if I want to make sure I have those things, I need to be proactively planting them each year. Whether I save seeds from last year, get some from a neighbor, or buy them new doesn't matter. If I want that fruit this year, I need to make it happen. It is like we do to get the 'character seeds' planted in our lives; maybe it is how we have done it before, maybe it is with the help of a brother or sister, or maybe it is starting fresh.

It is so cool to see how the garden changes year after year, with the perennials that are always there and the annuals and vegetables that change year after year. Like our lives, the garden shows how our underlying character and relationship with God meets with the different things we need in each season. For a relationship, or a difficult time at work, etc.

I love how he teaches us about how to live, we just need to look around! Thanks Spring!

"The limit doesn't exist!"

Wow, I have been out of the blog game for awhile!!!  The thoughts have still been coming, I have just done a poor job sitting down and typing them out to share with you all.  It is a good thing though- last year was a year of "uprooting" and clearing out things in my life to make room for ways I think God wants to grow me. Planting some seeds, getting involved in some new groups, seeing some new community growing. It was hard but exciting- I am a future-oriented person, so it is exciting to have things to be excited about.  But here we go...


So I am a little bit of a math nerd- engineer by trade but I love my math. There is a chance a some of you never learned about integrals and derivatives, sums and all that fun Calculus stuff, but you may better relate to Mean Girls. When Cadie, the main character, is punished and has to join the "Mathletes" and the answer is something about how the limit does not exist because it approaches infinity. That is kind of what we are going with here.

The thought is based on how "man is made in God's image". I think we can keep that very closely focussed on how the literal human being is made, male and female, to reflect God's characteristics.  I believe this is true and beautiful. This should not be overlooked- he is not defined by a gender or role as we perceive it, yet males and females do reflect characteristics of who He is.

What I was thinking about was the vastness of this truth. That man is made in God's image, but it is so much larger than that. Not just humanity in general, but each and every individual who has ever and will ever exist. That they are all made in God's image. We are all similar in a lot of ways, but also uniquely different in so many- our combination of passions, thoughts, personality, character traits, etc. My thought is that God is more than just the general, He is also the sum of all those unique individual things.

So here comes the math...as the people who exist go from one to approaching infinity, I think the sum of all those people 's unique traits combined approach the wholeness of who God is.  Yet God is God, so we never can really reach him, just get close. The limit does not exist! It takes all the billions of humans to ever exist to approach the fullness of God. And to me, that is a really cool thought. It is not just the general things of humanity, but also all the unique characteristics of each individual through all of time as we know it who reflect God. That is why it is so important that we love our brothers and sisters because they each reflect a part of who God is to the world that is unique to literally just them. It is beautiful!