Gardening! Sermonizing! Procrastinating!

Our pastor honored me with a request to supply preach for him this weekend.  I agreed, foolishly, completely ignoring the part where he said that it was Ascension Sunday when he asked (several weeks ago).  Now I find myself in front of a few scattered paragraphs that will somehow form a coherent ten-minute discussion of the Ascension of Christ by tomorrow morning.  


Sermonizing is interesting and pleasant and forces me to spend serious time focusing on a small amount of text.  On Wednesday I had absolutely no thoughts whatsoever on the Ascension.  After four days of thinking and attempting to write, I've discovered that this particular event does not enter into my own spirituality very deeply (or at all).  So here I am, analyzing how this event fits in spiritually and narratively with the parts of the gospels I think about more often (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount, the throwing-the-rat-bastards-out-of-the-temple incident).  


Meanwhile, in the time I have been not writing my sermon, I have read four graphic novels, three books on escaping evangelical childhood, two science fiction tomes, the contents of the whole internet.  My hubby and I have watched three exciting movies and countless exciting Simpsons episodes with commentary.  I weeded my garden, sporadically.  I bought new clothes and exulted over new CSA produce and attended parties and basically did everything pleasant I could think of to avoid writing a sermon.   Now it is Saturday night, and I must do what my father before me did every Saturday night all my life, and "tweak" the sermon into a more acceptable state of disrepair.  I'll even make pizza, like my mother did my whole life.


My garden flourishes, variably.  Today I saw the first tomato buds!

That's right, some day soon that little green knob will be a juicy tomato. 

Here's one of my surviving squash plants:

 On Sunday, when I last posted, I had at least nine sprouted plants.  By Tuesday, I had about fifteen.  But today, only six survive some terrible slime plague.  I cried when my plants disappeared overnight--good God, I'm so emotional over these little plants.  I'll be a nutcase when I have kiddos.

 These are the wild strawberries.  I never stop being amazed that literally the only thing I have to do to them is not kill them, and they grow.  I think that's a metaphor for not overprotecting children or something but I'm happy with that non-metaphorical juicy red bite.

And finally the first pepper of the year.  It's a Hungarian wax pepper.  I don't even know what it will taste like--someone I know was selling the seedlings and it sounded like a good idea at the time. Isn't it adorable?