I'm a Potato ... And So Are You

Cupping in hand this firm red potato, I thoughtfully run a thumb across eye tops. It’s alive, yet dying. White spikes reach boldly upward, unafraid.

We press potato pieces into narrow graves. Her tiny fingers carefully placing each one, eyes-up. I clutch the garden hoe; a line of potato pieces stretching out before me. The metal blade scrapes and dirt tumbles over each piece.  I wonder what it looks like in there. What does it look like when life and death meet? Who wins?

Maybe it looks a lot like here. Dying and alive, we’re put in this place where pain and sorrow and struggles somehow help transform death to life…

We walk across the yard to return tools to shed. I turn back to glance the garden.

It’s full of manure.

The cat crouches to add more.

And all the transformation (that apparently needs heaps of manure and stink and bugs and dirt) – all that magic of change happens where we can’t see it.

And after that one clump of eye tops dies to live,

the grave will be opened and the fruit counted

and we will celebrate

the fruit

the process

and the One who makes the magic happen

-and in the grave of all places

It’s all so … God. He’s brilliant like that.