New Life

I saw this violet the other day. It wasn't looking too hot. Turns out little violet plants don't like twenty degree window sills. No flowers on this one. That's the first thing to go when you enter survival mode, I guess, the part that looks and smells good. (On a side note, I can see a parallel to new mother-hood here. A friend of mine with a one month old reports that she judges the success of her day by whether she's managed to shower or not.)

So, this violet has no violet. But it does have leaves, those velvety ones. and violets kind of grow their leaves in concentric circles. The outer three circles of leaves are white. (This is not normal). As you get closer to the center of the plant, the leaves have a very slight yellow-green tint. But the three little leaves coming right up out of the center are new, and they're green. Real green.

Poor little violet might be barely hanging on, but there's new life there.



I can't wait to watch it bloom.

A New Thing

I find it easy to say, with complete confidence, that God is indeed doing a new thing. That's just how God is (we can see it all over the Bible); he's always doing a new thing - creating, redeeming, restoring, re-ordering.
It gets a little harder, though, when I try to pinpoint exactly what new thing God might be doing in my life, in my world. Joshua has one of those photomosiac jigsaw puzzles, a bunch of tiny pictures of Abraham Lincoln on the individual pieces form one large picture of Abe. Now, I'm not any good at puzzles when they're simple, but this one even frustrated my semi-idiot-savant puzzle-doing husband. It's harder to see how the bigger picture all fits together when I'm so consumed with the tiny pictures right in front of me.
How do you discern what God is doing in/through/with (or without) you?

That's not a rhetorical question. I'm really wondering.