After cutting open the rich green fruit of an avocado, I washed the seed, stuck toothpicks in it, and left it by the kitchen window suspended in a mason jar filled with water.
This is how my own mom used to grow avocado plants. I feel close to home and very much like the California girl I was raised to be when I help an avocado seed become something more than it was this morning.
That seed looks so perfect and complete. Its smooth outer shell is shaped like a teardrop. It sits, seemingly static and unchanging. But it is full of life, and hundreds, maybe even thousands, of blooms are waiting inside it.
I walk by it to wipe off the table and my mind is caught in wonder at what could be happening inside that seed.
How does the stuff in there sprout and grow? What changes first?
Chop open the seed and you will find a big mass of exactly nothing. But hang it on a mason jar and wait a few weeks, and you get new life that grows to become a multiplication miracle.
I snap a photo, and I think now that I have a photo of a soul on the windowsill in my kitchen.
Multiplication miracles, new green shoots of life, they burst out of people, too.
We are never done blooming.
Even when it looks like we are complete and static on the outside.
Even when life cracks us open and we are a big mess of nothing on the inside.
We set our lives up there, soaking in living water and the light of God’s word, and we wait.
It feels like death on the windowsill. Waiting requires more teardrops and more time than is ever expected.
The words and thoughts inside us well up with hope, twist and shape themselves into something altogether new.
Becoming new is always strange and mysterious. But then the first green shoot emerges and with it blooms the greatest revelation of all:
I never could have been anything else.
Beauty for ashes, dead bones brought to life, sinners redeemed and saved by grace. It always looks hopeless before God does the most amazing multiplication miracles.
So I sit here on the windowsill, feeling like I am full of a big mass of nothing, but also grateful for the view and the chance to know, I never want to be anything but what He makes me.
The blooming will be worth the wait.
