Though we got our first snow and cold temps this past week, I am so grateful for the amazing, warm fall we’ve just been treated to. July through mid-September were a bit (huh, understatement!) of a trial at our house as both of us dealt with some health challenges, and the nice, sunny days did a great deal to help us trudge through. As a kind of therapy to get myself through, I embarked on a garden project so that I could do something creative while soaking sunshine and blue sky into my body and my soul.
I got the idea from a picture I saw on Pinterest. From there, I talked to our dear friend Cliff and wheedled him out of about 150 old red bricks. Next came three arduous days of sweat and hard work. I needed to remove about three inches of the earth’s crust from the front of my garden shed. Crust being the operative word. Hard, packed crust. Insisting on keeping the project to myself, I didn’t let Karl help, so the going was slow. Eventually I had the shell removed and everything level and perfect. Then came the fun part, creating a mosaic with bricks to decorate the entrance area to the garden shed. I never pictured it as solid brick (which is good because we didn’t have enough!), so after the bricks were set, Karl and I went to a garden center and bought some pretty pea gravel to fill in around the bricks. We added some landscaping timber to create the outside edge (I did need help with that, thanks, Love!).
I’m so pleased with the result, and interestingly, I realize that the project itself was a perfect allegory of our hard times.
When life deals us difficulties, it’s so easy to only see the hard and ugly crust of the situation. We have to keep the vision of what is to come and choose to keep going and choose to endure. We have to pay attention to the small victories and search for reasons to smile and be grateful. Putting one foot in front of the other sometimes is the best we can do (or one tiny shovel-full at a time!). It is only when the worst is behind us, when the pain has subsided, that we can look back and see the beautiful mosaic that God created as a result of our journey.
