There’s a drama going on in our yards, and I’m not talking cicadas. The curtain goes up and the sun shines down like a spotlight on some amazing performances.

A just-picked tomato, fully ripened on the vine in the back yard. Add a bit of salt. Don’t leave it on the counter to sit at room temperature. Just eat it. Like an apple or plum. The meaty warmth, the tangy sweetness balanced with the pinch of salt.

The English pea. Pull its little zipper to open its jacket and the peas spill out magically. Put them in the simmering water and when they rise to the top, they are done. Add your favorite herb if you like. Let their heat melt a bit of butter. Sweet jewels of the earth.

Just weeks ago, they were seeds, little ones you could barely make out as they fled your hands free-falling onto the burrow of earth that then covered them like sleeping bags and tents keeping the kids warm in their backyard sleepover. Rain comes, then sun, a spotlight on the stage, shining on them, time to act, don’t forget your lines or the blocking. Again, and again. Here they are today—lettuce leaves, brilliant greens with hints of yellow green and a streak of burgundy that suggests blood but is nothing really, just a touch of color to fill your salad bowl, a canvas on which you can paint other colors—carrot, tomato, parsley, pepper.

What are the little black dots I rush by as I mow the grass? When I’m done, I go over to investigate. Black currants in two places. These new hedges are not big enough to bear much. Tiny blackberries in another. Their canes quite old, many years hidden in the shade growth of a makeshift meadow. They hide in cool and verdant shade. These few fruits release their juices and natural pectin with the help of a little sugar and a bit of flame. No need to worry about canning; there’s just enough here for a piece of toast—here today, gone tomorrow.

Last week a friend gifted us with an onion from his garden. Better than Vidalia, he said. We took it home and added it to the evening chowder of summer corn, tomato, potato. No tears upon cutting it. The onion was sweeter than you could imagine.

The leeks have a long way to go. They aren’t even as thick as a number two pencil at this point. But they will thicken with time. Something to look forward to in the fall or even the winter. They’ll stay alive even through snow and ice, heartier than I could ever be, but I have only to wait. Maybe I’ll harvest on my birthday week in December, and we’ll have one of them in our potato leek soup. This is something worth waiting for.

God routinely takes a little seed and transforms it into whatever, a bunch of lettuce you can trim leaf by leaf and it keeps giving more. A little seed, dirt, rain, sun. Voilà. There are so many varieties, more than we could ever imagine . . . a vine of cucumbers, multi-colored radishes. Think of the crazy vine of tomatoes that tastes like nature’s candy, carrots in the many colors of Joseph’s coat, just-picked beans filled with natural flavor, so many shapes and colors. What’s God going to come up with next?

What about people?

The dead of winter, people stand frozen, like statues of hate and sin, lost. Maybe these are people I don’t like. People I can’t stand. People not like you and me. People who think they’re better. Maybe they are and that’s why I don’t like them. People I know are worse than I am. I might want to act like weeds, choking out new little sprouts or blocking the sun when the little sapling is just getting started.

I need to find refuge from those misguided thoughts. Repent. It’s hard to tell what a seed is going to be when it’s just a seed. We need to have faith that growth and change and hope is all around us because it is God who is doing the work in people even more so than what’s happening in my backyard garden.

Perhaps the Lord of the harvest wants to use us as part of the dirt, sun, water regimen that transforms from seed to plant to amazing harvest. What can we say? What might we do to be a part of the theater of transformation God is producing and directing as we plant, water and weed in the solstice of his ever-loving Son. He will surprise us as he uses us, transforms us, as he grows and changes the garden of his goodness and life that’s all around us, a tragedy that becomes a comedy, a stone statue in the garden come to flesh-and-blood life.

Like Hermione . . .
You gods, look down
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head! (Winter's Tale Act 5, scene 3)

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:8)