Expect the Unexpected

In the front of our house is an old cut-off valve for the main water supply.  When it was installed, the plumbers put a large PVC pipe around it to protect it from the elements.  For years it was shielded from view by an extremely large azalea bush.

A few years ago my husband laboriously removed the azalea bush that had become almost

"tree-sized." With the azalea bush gone, the ugly PVC pipe was visible to all who passed by.  To solve this problem I took an green wicker basket, cut a hole in the bottom and placed it over the pipe.  I used the basket to hold decorative items appropriate for each season.

Last fall, I stacked a group of pumpkins in the basket, the bottom-most one sitting directly on top of the PVC pipe.  Those pumpkins stayed pretty for a long time, or so I thought.  When I went to remove them to put Christmas items in the basket, I noticed the one on the pipe had become rotten at the bottom.  As I removed it, seeds spilled all into the pipe.  I put my Christmas balls in the basket and never thought about it again. . .until this fall.

As we were planning our fall flowers for the flower bed in which this pipe and basket now reside, I noticed a green vine actually growing out of the pipe.  One look at the broad, large leaves let us know this was a pumpkin vine growing from the seeds which spilled in the pipe last year.

The vine goes well with the store-bought pumpkins we have placed in our flower bed, but now we

might even have more than just a vine.  You see, yesterday I noticed there is a flower bud on our unexpected pumpkin vine.

Never did we expect to have a pumpkin vine growing in our front flower bed, but certainly we didn't expect it to come out of the ugly PVC pipe.

It is such a wonderful picture of how the Lord works in our lives.  Sometimes we find ugly things in our lives - perhaps wrought from others, or the work of the enemies who seek to destroy us, or even from our own poor choices.  We find things we wish weren't there, but are powerless to remove.  As we trust the Lord about these matters, believing that He has every aspect of our lives in His hand and His heart, we may find that He can bring unexpected surprises from those things we have sought from Him to be removed.

It is an amazing thing to consider that our Lord is so great He can take even the painful, negative things in our lives and turn them to our good.  We can therefore have great confidence in His ability to keep us, protect us, console us, comfort us and to love us with "an everlasting love."

Be joyful and begin to expect the unexpected, for we have a great God.

Psalms 145:3

"Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable."