hope, revisited

After my last post, I took the opportunity to spend a few minutes in the "garden" with the boys.  We dug up some of the many things we don't want growing there, turned the dirt with some fertilizer (the one thing the bats are good for), and transplanted the tomato.  It was a stirring moment, like something out of Field of Dreams -- a man struggling to do something that no one else understands, yet which provides him hope and purpose for the moment yada yada yada....  But the kids got to see the usefulness of bat dung again, which is always cool for our boys.
Then I looked out later and didn't see anything there at all.  I asked the kids, and they disavowed knowledge.  Here is a pic I took the next morning:

No more than 12 hrs after planting it, our DOG, who is so hot she has no business living on the equator, sat on it. Rolled in the freshly dug up (and cool) earth, actually.  Which I'm sure was fun for her.  Ha ha.
But I had not even passed the second of the five stages of grief over my dead tomato plant of hope, when the children brought news of more volunteers on the compound.  That's the great thing about the equator.  Even though its so hot that dogs bred for elsewhere feel the urge to roll in your garden, stuff grows like crazy, like it or not.  Which has been good, given the time we've been able to set aside for gardening (i.e., none).
But with all these ups and downs, I guess that's why the scriptures say