The Geranium Project

If I blog next Saturday night, it will hopefully be from Beirut, Lebanon.  I don’t know how much Internet access I will have, but I do hope to post updates.  I may update more from my Facebook page (not my personal page), since I can post there directly from my phone.  I will try to share a little more information about my trip early next week, right before my departure on Wednesday, September 9.

When I return to Brady Street (Lord willing!) summer will be gone.  My mind goes to my favorite story of the summer…

I call it the “Geranium Project”: sharing big pots of geraniums with neighbors who agree to take care of them.  One young lady, who I knew from our boys and girls club, liked the idea, but she was afraid the toddlers in her house would destroy the flowers.

I didn’t doubt her.  Their house was continually overflowing.  People everywhere… even in the middle of the day, four or five adult men might be seen lounging on the cement stoop.  Raised voices sizzled through the evening air, scorching our ears half a block away.  There were no marriages, only “relationships”, resulting in a family tree so gnarled I could never keep it straight.  Rumor had it they had been evicted from their last house when when of the boys shot out a neighbor’s windows.

But I finally convinced her to give it a try, with the promise that I would replant if the flowers were destroyed.

Instead of getting a place of honor on the front steps, her pot of flowers landed in the middle of a small patch of lawn to the left of the steps, all alone.  I nearly gave them up for loss immediately.

Then one day, I noticed the bird feeder.  Beside the pot of flowers, someone had forced a tall metal pole into the lawn, and suspended a bird feeder full of feed.  Remember, this is a neighborhood where tarps, masking tape, and plastic sheets hold the houses together.  I don’t remember ever seeing a bird feeder before, although I might just not have noticed.

And it was right beside the flowers.

A few trips later, a new occupant arrived, close to the flowers: a grill.  These people grill? was my surprised, unkind thought.

Then one day, I was driving past, and someone had parked a plastic lawn chair beside the flowers.  It was empty, but clearly someone had been there.

But the day I really remember, was a day I was biking home from work.  I sailed over the St. Joe River on the Lexington Street bridge and turned left into “the hole”.  I crashed through the 5th Street potholes and was about to turn the wrong way up the Brady Street one-way, when I saw them.

ALL the men from the front steps were seated on chairs, in a semi-circle around the pot of geraniums.

As I looked at them, they waved and smiled cheerily back.

Perhaps they are a lazy bunch of people who use welfare money instead of getting jobs.  Probably, they are a symbol of what is wrong with America, what is wrong with Elkhart.

But the power of God’s Creation, of natural beauty without blemish, of things done right, looking right, still touched them.  The flowers drew them like a magnet, exerting a silent electric force more powerful than the constant clamor of 5th Street.

And, as long as a person can still respond to the power of God’s beauty, they must also be within reach of God’s grace!