The Seed and the Second Chair

Sister Beverly gives Ana a paper envelope of sunflower seeds, and Ana plants them along the fence with plans for blooms taller than Dad. Then she discovers there is nothing to do but wait — and waiting has never been Ana’s strong suit. That same week, Brother Thompson goes to Dad and to the Pastor with the biggest question of his life: he wants to ask Sister Beverly to marry him. The counsel he receives is one small word. Wait. To Ana, who is seven and in a hurry, wait sounds an awful lot like no — until a dug-up seed, a quiet porch, and a secret she must carry all by herself teach her the difference. A warm story about God’s timing, godly counsel, and the things that are growing right now where nobody can see them. Scripture: Psalm 27:14; Galatians 6:9 (KJV).

www.pathstoglory.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, Mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close. Papa has a story for you about your favorite family The Joneses. It was the tale end of summer when the days had gone heavy, and golden in the evenings came on a little sooner than they had in June, and it was on one of those evenings as Sister Beverly put an envelope into Anna's hands. It was only a plain paper envelope soft at the corners, with sunflowers written across the front and pencil. Inside there were seeds she had saved out of her own garden the year before, striped grey and white, and she poured a few into Anna's palm so she could see them. These are the big ones, Sister Beverly said. Grow taller than a grown man if you treat them right. Anna looked at Dad. Anna looked at the seeds. Anna made a decision. Taller than Dad, she said. They planted them the next morning along the fence and the whole family had opinions about it. Alison arrived with a diagram, because of course she did, and set little labeled stakes at the end of the road so no one would step on anything. Addison studied the fence for a while with one finger against her chin, and moved the whole row four feet to the left, because that was where the afternoon light came through. And if a person was going to grow something beautiful, it might as well stand where the light would find it. Ava Grace was given the watering can and used it the way she did everything, slowly and with great care, tipping it just so gently, she instructed nobody in particular. They're babies. Andy helped by sitting down in the dirt and patting it with both hands, which put a good deal of the garden onto Andy and a good deal of Andy into the garden. He was thoroughly pleased with himself. Messy, he reported, holding up one filthy palm for inspection. And Anna, who had done the actual planting at a speed that alarmed everyone, sat back on her heels and looked at the flat brown earth and said, Okay, how long? Ten days, Mom said, maybe more. Anna stared at her as though she had said ten years. Ten days? Ten entire days of nothing at all happening on purpose? Now Anna noticed things. People sometimes assume she didn't on account of how fast she moved. But a girl who is always in motion goes past a great many things and sees most of them. And what Anna noticed that week was that Brother Thompson had gone quiet. Not sad quiet, something else. He sat on his porch in the evenings the way he always did, with pickles stretched out on the boards beside him, and he didn't say much, and twice Anna caught him looking at the second chair when there was nobody in it. On Sunday he asked Dad if he could have a word after service, and the two of them walked out to the parking lot together, and stood by the car for a long time. Anna saw him go into pastor's office and shut the door. She reported all of this at dinner at length in order with theories. Dad set down his fork, he looked at Mom for a moment and something passed between them. Then he said I'll tell you, but it stays at this table. Five children went perfectly still, which had never once happened before. Brother Thompson has been praying about asking Sister Beverly to marry him. Dad said. He came to me about it, and he went to the pastor. Anna came up out of her chair like something launched. There was going to be a wedding. She had already drawn it. She had drawn it weeks ago, cake and all, and pickles in a bow tie, and now it was actually truly finally going to happen, and she was going to need flowers and a dress and possibly a basket and Anna, Dad said gently, sit down, honey. There's more. She sat. Pastor told him to wait, Dad said. Anna's whole face came down at once. Wait, she said. Wait for what? They already like each other, everybody knows it. Pickles practically lives at both houses. What is there to wait for? Nothing's wrong, Dad said. That's the part I want you to hear. Nobody told him no. Nobody found a single thing the matter with it. Then why? Dad thought about how to say it to a seven year old and decided the true thing was usually also the simple thing. Because it's only been a few months, he said, and because Brother Thompson is still fairly new in the Lord, and the pastor wants him rooted good and deep before he takes the biggest promise a man ever makes, and because a thing done right is worth what it cost you to wait for it. Alison, who liked to know the shape of things, asked the practical question, wait how long? Nobody said that answered. That's the part that takes faith. Then he looked around the table at every one of them and his voice was kind, but it did not leave any room. And not one word of this leaves this house. Sister Beverly doesn't even know. It isn't ours to tell. Anna felt that land on her like a coat three sizes too heavy. She had never in her life held on to anything. Words came out of Anna the way water comes out of a hose. That was simply the arrangement. And now she was carrying the single biggest thing she had ever known, and she was going to have to carry it past the very person it was about. By day six there was still nothing along the fence but dirt. Anna had checked it every morning and most evenings. She had checked it in the rain. She had knelt down and put her face an inch from the ground and looked at it sideways on the theory that a sprout might be easier to see from an angle. Nothing. Flat brown dirt. Exactly as flat and exactly as brown as the day they put the seeds in it. So on the evening of the sixth day, Anna dug one up. She only meant to look. She scraped the dirt back with two fingers, careful as she knew how to be until she found it. And there it was, and it was not sunflower at all. It was a pale, swollen lump, split down one side with a thin white thread curling out of the bottom of it. It didn't look like anything. It certainly didn't look taller than Dad. Anna sat back in the dirt with it in her palm and felt the disappointment go all the way through her. And then right behind it something worse, because Anna was seven and not stupid. She understood that she had just pulled up something that had been busy. Mom found her there a little while later with dirt on her knees, not moving, which for Anna meant a great deal. I ruined it, Anna said. Mom sat down on the grass beside her, right there in her house clothes and looked at the little pale thing in Anna's hand. It was working, she said. It didn't look like it was working. It never does, said Mom. That's the whole trouble with roots, honey. They go down before anything goes up. All that time you were standing here thinking nothing was happening, everything was happening. Just underneath, where you couldn't get at it. She brushed the dirt off Anna's knee. You can't keep pulling it up to see if it's growing. Pulling it up is the one thing that stops it. Anna was quiet for a second. Then she said very low. That's what they told Brother Thompson. Mom didn't answer that. She only put an arm around her and let her think it. The next afternoon, Anna walked down the street to Brother Thompson's house the way she had done once before, with a folded drawing in her hand. She had braced herself the whole way. She expected to find him wrecked over it. That was how it would have made her feel. Being told to wait for the one thing you wanted most. But Brother Thompson was on the porch with his Bible open on his knee and pickles asleep across his feet. And he looked about as settled as a man can look. I heard, Anna said, sitting down on the step. Dad told us I'm not telling anybody. I know you're not, he said. That's why he told you. She pulled her knees up. Aren't you mad? No, he said. And then honestly, because he did not believe in telling children comfortable things that weren't so. It's hard, though. I won't pretend. It's hard about well, every day. But then why did you even ask then? You could have just done it. Brother Thompson smiled a little at that. You're right, I could have. But I didn't go to your dad and the pastor looking for permission, Anna. I went looking for the truth. And if a man only wants to be told yes, he ought not ask the question at all. He looked out toward the street. I did the same thing before I ever asked her to court. Went to your dad first, and it worked out all right. But but what if it takes forever? Then it takes forever, he said. I'd a whole lot rather have God's yes a year from now than my own yes today. Anna turned that over. It was a large thing to turn over when you're seven. Then she looked at the two chairs sitting there side by side and the dog folded up between them. And she said the thing she had come to say without knowing she had come to say it. Wait isn't the same as no. No? You're right it's not, said Brother Thompson. He tipped his head toward the empty chair beside him. Look there. That chair's already sitting on my porch. Nobody's taken one thing away from me, Anna. I'm just not done being given it yet. That night at devotion, Dad reached over for the Bible without looking the way he always did, and read them something out of Psalms twenty seven and thirteen. Wait on the Lord. Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart. Wait, I say on the Lord. Notice he says it twice, Dad said. He knew we'd need telling more than once. Then he turned to Galatians six and nine and read them one more. And let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not. In due season, Dad said, That's a farmer's word. It means the harvest comes when the harvest is ready, and not one day sooner. And no amount of standing in the field hollering at it will move it up. Alison had been waiting with her question the whole time. But how do you know when it's God saying wait? she said, and not God saying no. Well, that's a good question, Dad said, and he meant it. A note closes the door. A wait keeps hold of your hand. David Grace from the floor added her whole contribution to the evening in six words. The seeds are still down there, you know, she said. Nobody had anything to add to that. So nobody tried. The hard part came Sunday in the church for you, and it came in the shape of Sister Beverly herself. Well, she said, catching Anna by both shoulders the way she did, how are my sunflowers coming along? And there it was, Anna still two feet from the one person in the entire world who did not know, holding the biggest and best secret she had ever been handed with her mouth already open the way her mouth generally was. Papa would like it noted here that this was without question the hardest thing Anna had ever done. She closed her mouth. She thought about it, and then she said they're growing where I can't see. Sister Beverly laughed out loud and said that was about the best way to put it she'd ever heard, and she went on in to find her seat. Across the foyer, Brother Thompson had heard every word of it. He did not say anything, he just looked at Anna, and Anna looked back at him. And the two of them shared a thing that nobody else in that whole building had any idea about, which is a remarkable feeling when you're seven years old, and have never successfully kept a secret in your life. It was eleven days in the end, not ten. Anna counted every one of them, and she did not dig up so much as one more, which was its own quiet kind of miracle. On the eleventh morning she went out before breakfast still in her pajamas and stopped dead at the edge of the row. Green. Little pale green loops, pushing up out of the dirt, with the seed husks still stuck on top of them like little small hats. One and then another, and then five all down in a row where Addison had said the afternoon light would find them. Anna screamed at the house awake because she was still Anna and there was no help for that. Alison came running with her hair half done. Addison arrived and immediately observed that they had come up crooked, and that this was somehow better anyway. Ava Grace crouched down nose to nose with the nearest one and whispered something to it that nobody else could hear. Andy took one look at the whole business and threw both arms straight up over his head. Happy, he announced. And Anna stood there in the wet grass and did not touch a single one of them, which was considering everything, the most grown up thing she had ever done. That evening Mom found her out by the fence again, sitting cross legged a respectful distance from the road just looking. They're small, Anna said. They are, said Mom. They're gonna be taller than Dad, though, she said it with total confidence, the way she said most things. Then she was quiet a moment. They were already growing the whole time. Even on the days it looked like nothing. That's usually how it goes, Mom said. Anna thought about a porch down the street with two chairs on it, and a man sitting in one of them with his Bible open, not mad, not finished, just not done being given it yet. She had it in her head that the whole thing was one thing. Somehow. The dirt and the chair and the not yet. She could not have explained it if you paid her. Mom, she said, is it still hard for him? Probably, Mom said. God doesn't usually take the hard part out, baby. He just stays right in it with you till it turns into something. They sat out there together a while longer, the two of them until the light went, and the first stars came out, and the whole row of green things kept right on doing what it had been doing all along Quietly underneath, where nobody could see it. The Lord is never late, and he is almost never early. And the waiting is not him forgetting about you. Now who's ready for brownies?