“You gardeners are an optimistic bunch,” my husband said to me as I switched off the grow light. “You have seedlings growing in your basements in the hope that spring is actually going to come in time to plant them.”

This winter the act of sowing seeds does seem like an act of faith, particularly when the spring equinox has come, but the weather forecast hints that the gray desert of winter might extend for another month. It is good that Easter is late this year; Mother Nature seems to be in a mood to linger in a Lenten mode. Even the tiny seedlings growing indoors seem unusually hesitant to unfurl their first leaves. It does take hope to believe that conditions will ever be right for future growth.

To me seeds themselves are a kind of miracle. They are actually alive, but in a kind of suspended animations, waiting for just the right conditions of heat and light and moisture to call forth the life within. Most are made to outlast the long cold of winter; some even need it in order to germinate. It does not really take that much to coax them into growth.

I think that to God we are seeds, living, but holding within us some greater, fully possibility of life that is waiting to be called forth by God’s love and the love of God in those around us. That is our heat and light and water, and the life that comes forth is our spring and our Easter joy.

God is the most optimistic gardener.

- Kathleen Knaack