Bucky Planted the Garden and He Did It Wrong

I drew the garden on graph paper. I want that understood before anything else happens in this story.

I used a ruler. I put the corn along the north edge because the corn is tallest and it would shade the lettuce if I put it anywhere else. I put the beans in their own square, in rows, and the squash in its own square, in rows, and I left a path down the middle exactly two feet wide so a person could walk it with a bucket in each hand. It took me most of a Saturday and my dad looked at it and said it was a good plan, and he meant it, and I have the paper still.

The seed packets sat on the shelf in the shed. On the shelf. Not on the floor, on the SHELF, which is a thing I mention because of what happened next.

Bucky got into the shed sometime in the night. He ate four of the packets, which is a normal amount of packets for him to eat, and then he took the rest of them in his mouth and shook his head the way he does, and the seed went everywhere. Beans and squash and corn and lettuce, all of it, all over the dirt of a garden that had been rototilled that afternoon and was as soft as a cake.

My dad hollered my whole name at about six in the morning. Tobias. Nobody says Tobias unless the goat has been somewhere.

We could not get the seed back. You cannot get seed back out of soft dirt, that is the entire point of dirt. So we raked it in and we said some things about goats and we waited to see what would happen, and what happened in June is that the beans came up climbing the corn, and the squash came up sprawling all over the path where nobody could walk, and there were no rows anywhere, and it was the best garden this farm has ever had.

The beans held the corn up and did something to the dirt that made the corn taller. The squash covered the ground so thick that no weed got a start all summer, and I did not pull a single weed, not one, in the whole of that year. My dad stood at the edge of it in August with his hands on his hips for a long time and he did not say anything at all, which from him is a whole speech.

The sentence in Isaiah is not an apology

People quote this verse to each other when something has gone wrong, and they usually quote it gently, the way you hand somebody a blanket.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8, 9)

Read the second half again, because the second half is the part that gets left off. He does not say His ways are different from ours. He says they are HIGHER. That is not two roads going to two places. That is one road going further up than the one that got drawn on graph paper.

So the verse is not a soft way of saying no. It is a claim about altitude, and it is being made by the one who can see the whole field.

You are not looking at a plan that failed. You are looking at a plan that got overruled by a better one, and Isaiah 55 says out loud whose plan is higher. His Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort instead of a lecture.

And the reason this matters at six years old and also at forty six is that a person can spend a very long time mourning graph paper.

You have not lost anything that God intends to leave lost. That is the whole shape of Isaiah 55, which ends with the promise that His word does not come back empty, and it is His Spirit and not your optimism who makes a sentence like that stand up on a bad morning.

The brothers drew the map and God drew a different one

There is a man in Genesis whose plan got wrecked by people, not by a goat, and it got wrecked for twenty two years.

Joseph's brothers put him in a pit and sold him. That is not a mild thing and Scripture does not treat it as one. He went to Egypt as property, he went to prison for something he did not do, and by any reading of his graph paper the whole thing was a ruin.

Then at the end of it, standing in front of the men who did it, he says the sentence this whole category is built on:

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. (Genesis 50:20)

Notice what he does not say. He does not say it was not evil. He does not tell his brothers they meant well. He lets the wrong stay wrong, and then he says that God was working a second thing through the same events, at the same time, without asking anybody's permission.

You are inside a story God is already using, and the wrong part of it does not have to be renamed for that to be true. Genesis 50:20 holds both halves in one sentence, and His Spirit is the one who lets a person hold both halves without pretending.

There were seven years of famine coming that nobody knew about. The route to the granary ran through a pit, a lie and a prison, and there was no other route that year, and nobody in the family would have drawn it.

You have a God who is not improvising around your mess. He is working, and He was working the whole time. That is what the text says and not what anybody felt, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and standing on it.