The Bees Came . . .

Last updated on: October 16, 2016 at 7:15 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Bees Came . . . 2016-10-15T09:13:39-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Imagine an entire project turning on the appearance of bees.

So it was when The Saint Constantine School defied history and planted a garden. Government schools show and tell, we decided to plant and grow. The theory is simple: we have too much show and too little do. We have too much tell and too little listen.

What if college and kindergarten were all based on doing? Instead of borrowing money so you could pay someone for organized cheer, our goal was to do it ourselves.

Great books, gardening, and kindergarten and college. But no bees. . .

The pumpkins were planted, flowered, but sat there missing bees. You cannot command the bees. I began to wonder if we should set up an apiary. Did Arthur Conan Doyle have Holmes retire to Sussex to raise bees? Was there something in the Sherlock Holmes’ stories that might help?

Actually, no. We need bees and bees are not impressed with rhetoric or clever memes. They do not have social media feeds so you cannot friend them.

So what could we do? We had done all we could and now it was up to God. I prayed (and I assume our gardening professor, Mrs. Lewis prayed) and the bees came.

One day as I walked the perimeter, I saw bees everywhere. This is not, of course, a miracle. In the natural order of things bees come to pollinate the flowers, but that is the very wonder of it all.

We did our bit and God provided the rest: the bees came.

However broken the world might be, the bees mostly come. God made the world perfect and there would be no hunger, want, or gratuitous pain if humankind had followed his plan.

Still the engineering of the Intelligent Designer was so good that even when we try to ruin it all . . . staring at screens, sitting inside when outside is glorious, refusing to sweat to get a pumpkin because we can buy them in the store, His cosmos does not break. It keeps bringing blessings, even if we ignore them to watch the next Netflix video.

The bees come, but nobody has planted any pumpkins since we have paved over the turf with parking and the grass is artificial for games only semi-professionals play.

Much of the evil, the pain, we face comes because we hide in air conditioning and then are shocked to discover, all at once, that Houston, here and now, is hot and humid.

We plant nothing, the bees come, and nothing comes from nothing.

Today let’s decide to do something: work with the world and not against it. Let’s go outside, walk, and look at what is there. Let’s plant seeds and see what God does, knowing that we cannot buy bees.

We must wait and see what God and His order will do. When the bees come, then the pumpkin will come. God help us, but the world is good and we miss it because we hide away from it in our shame.

When we create, there is nothing we can do after a certain point. God sends the bees or we fail. Sometimes we fail and when He who could have helped does not, it must be better so.

But the bees most often come from His good hand as God takes our little idea and blesses it with a cosmic “be.”

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