UNEXPECTED TOMATOES

                A friend and I trade pet-sitting.  As she and her husband prepared to leave on a short vacation, she urged me to harvest and eat anything that ripened in her vegetable plot.

                “You’re welcome to anything,” she told me. “But the best tomatoes aren’t in the vegetable plot. They’re behind the hedge that grows right up against our wall. We found them while trimming bushes. I guess they somehow re-seeded themselves from the garden.”

                The next day found me in her back yard, tossing the ball for Pebbles, her gorgeous boxer. In between tosses, I checked out her garden. It was weed-less, the plants were all nicely stalked up, the ground looked well-watered, and it sat in the perfect sunny spot.

                There wasn’t much fruit, though.  Prime harvest time was past and garden pests had been feasting.  Curiously, I strolled to the hedge and peered behind it. Tangled in the bushes were plump tomatoes:  firm, colorful orangey red with un-blemished skins.

                They weren’t shaped normally, though.  They were odd and lumpy, unattractive by typical tomato standards. One looked more like a zucchini than anything else. Wondering how this weird fruit would go over at my dinner table, I took them home, washed them and put them in a bowl on the kitchen counter.

                Ten minutes, a husband and a teenage boy later, the tomatoes were history. My family raved about how delicious they were. It was as if God Himself had wrapped sunshine, summer rain and a touch of His sweetness into luscious unusual spheres for our enjoyment.

                I’ve realized God works that way in my life.  I try to create the perfect garden and growing conditions for those things most important to me, most notably my family, my career, and my volunteer work. I water, pull weeds and spray pesticides as if it’s up to me to direct God in the creation of perfect, normal life outcomes.

                I imagine the Master Gardener smiles a little and shakes His head as He works quietly behind His often impenetrable plans, creating not the ordinary, but a sublime tapestry. I agonize when He allows weeds and bugs I would eradicate, forgetting trouble brings strength and character. I often act as if I am an island, and the only thing that matters is what is happening in MY life, not how those happenings are part of innumerable other stories, many more  imperative than mine.

                More often than not, the important things in my life don’t  fit the usual definition of good, desirable, or lovely.  I try to remember God’s not in the business of the good, but of the best.

                God creates unexpected tomatoes, ones superior in their unique, divine way, "tomato" masterpieces that work well through the layers of many lives.