Article September 21, 2015 Issue

Watering the seed—the Word of God

Carolyn Keith

My husband and I had moved to the northern region of New Mexico with our three young children, and we were in the process of renovating and adding on to an old adobe house. It was a challenging time—the five of us were sharing the same room as a bedroom since this was the only available place to sleep in during construction. The window openings had plastic coverings as we were awaiting the delivery of windows. Winter was fast approaching.

One night, the youngest child, a one-year-old, became ill during the night. I picked him up and carried him into the bathroom so that we wouldn’t wake up the rest of the family. After walking across boards covering ditches in the dirt floor where pipes were being installed, I sat in the bathroom and prayed, singing hymns to the baby. But as I did so, I found myself crying and wishing we had never moved from our lovely home in California.

The room I was sitting in was part of the old portion of the house with large adobe bricks that were 75 years old. It was raining that night, and, because of the construction, water had seeped into the adobe. Soon, I looked up and noticed a sprout of alfalfa about a foot long coming out of the adobe wall. When originally made, the adobe bricks had been mixed with alfalfa. I was so startled to see this sprout that I started to laugh. Here was a symbol of the newness of life. A seed that had been dormant for 75 years had come to life when given some water!

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