Springtime in Texas…
The rain and cold have been good to Texas this year. The promise that a cold and wet winter brings a bounty of wildflowers has been proven once again by scattering liberally throughout the fields of Bluebonnets the lesser blooms of Indian Paintbrushes, Buttercups and Mexican Hats. The Huisache, Agarita, and Yucca are also abloom with great pride soon to remember the curses evoked the rest of the year due to their thorns and persistence in growing where you don’t want them.
For me, the spring brings a favorite which you smell before you see. Once you catch a whiff, the smell of grape Kool-Aid will forever remind you of the lavender blossoms that fall like grape clusters around the gangly branches of the Mountain Laurel.
My first experience with Mountain Laurel was on a hitchhiking trip to the Hill Country in the early 70’s. My buddy and I were camping at the Blue Hole in Wimberley and stretched out our sleeping bags in the darkness of a very cool spring night. All night long we could smell grape Kool-Aid. At first light we found ourselves at the foot of a hillside of the most beautiful and fragrant blooms I could ever imagine and never forgot.
Through the years whenever I smelled the flowers I would search out the gawky trees and bury my nose in the lavender blooms. Do it quick, by the way. You’ve only got three or four weeks to enjoy even in a good year. It is the classic Texan… tough as nails, loves the heat and sinks its roots down in the limestone so far that it’s impossible to tear it out. And yes, they only grow in Texas.
After the blooms fall, a seed pod appears that carries four or five beans. Texas schoolboys call them “red hots” and know how to get a yelp and a laugh by rubbing the rock-hard bean on a sidewalk till it burns. Dropping it down your buddies t-shirt works the best but I’ll call you a liar if you tell your kid you heard it from me.
So years ago, on the campus of Trinity University, I would try to extract the tiny little seedlings that sprouted on a hillside made soft by the live oak leaves that had fallen in February. As careful as I was though, the tap root had already sunk three times deeper than the single leaf shoot that had popped out, breaking off the root no matter how far I dug down with my fingers. The seed held the secret to Mountain Laurels, but with the nature of a rock it would be years before one out of a hundred would germinate and root.
There is a word in horticulture that is akin to the spiritual walk of mature believers. Scarification is the process of “scarring” a seed so that the moisture can begin the germination process. It does not work on all seeds, mind you, only those that are from species meant to grow in arid, hard and stoney places. Those that need deep roots and hardy trunks tend to produce seeds that need to be scarred before they are planted.
I hold the seed with pliers and press it against the grinding wheel. The wound is just deep enough to break the surface. The heart of the seed can be seen now as the coat of iron-hard shell is broken allowing God’s process to begin.
I am writing from the living room of our home in Houston. The balcony door is open and the coolness of spring flows in with the sound of my “Pool of Bethesda” just outside. The sunlight is broken by the open blinds and the palm trees in the courtyard. A waterfall overwhelms the city noises, punctuated by the cooing of doves obsessively building their nests in the palms in each corner of the pool. The tile roofs of the buildings are alive with pigeons which make the airspace a continual arial spectacle as they dart in and out.
Here is where we have landed… and waited… and recovered… from what we thought had no end. My heart was so hard! My soul, though thoroughly saturated in God’s Word and servant experience was not scarred sufficiently to produce what my life had been called to produce. And He, the Lover of my soul, would “love me too hard” in order to break through the crust and allow His living water to penetrate.
Lillian Trotter, the very first missionary to Algiers, wrote of the death of the seed. “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies…” remember? She said the burial is not sufficient. Like the Mountain Laurel, the outer shell is too hard and must be scarred, wounded, split and finally rot to allow death to really take over. The “second death” is invoked, rotting the beautiful hard shell which then becomes the first nutrient of the tender shoot. God wastes nothing.
It is from that death that life and purpose are birthed. Isaiah spoke of the process…
“ Watchman, how far gone is the night ?” The watchman says, “Morning comes but also night. If you would inquire, inquire; come back again.”
Life will be a night followed by a morning, followed by a night. The cycle established since the Fall will move forward… again and again. But it need not happen without godly purpose.
My seeds spent 3 years in a ziplock bag waiting for a springtime planting. They visited the pliers and grinder, soaked for days in water and were planted in waxed starbuck’s cups with the help of my friend, Benjamin. Though he does not know it now, his 3 years of life have also been scarred by a faithful God who will cause all things to work for his good. Like those seeds that lay in the dark, hard and silent, the day his life was scarred began God’s process of growth.
Elizabeth Elliot wrote,
Suffering creates the possibility of growth in holiness, but only to those who, by letting all else go, are open to the training – not by arguing with the Lord about what they did or did not do to deserve punishment, but by praying, “Lord, show me what You have for me in this.”
Properly scarred, my seeds will now grow. When they do, I will plant them around the church with Benjamin in another couple of years. It is then that I will tell him what he does not remember, that Pop scarred them in order to force them to grow, that he hid the seeds with his momma in the little cups, and that God does things for our good that the world perverts into something cruel.
And more important than anything else, God’s way is proven and will produce what the world can never know.
Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. For My own sake, for My own sake, I will do it; For how should My name be profaned? And I will not give My glory to another. Isaiah 48:10-11
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