Terrarium
Lora Parsons
The Ashland Beacon
The word “terrarium” comes from the Latin prefix “Terre,” meaning land or Earth, and the word part “-arium” denoting a place for observing life. When our daughter left for college this last semester, she left all her green growing things in my care, one being a small terrarium. I don’t do plants well. Before I fully knew this about myself, I’d bring home plants with good intentions, and my husband would ask where I was going to bury them, rather than plant them. He knew. Now, any plants that come into our home are his to care for. I love the IDEA of being a plant mom, but not the reality of that title. Olivia’s placement of her plants on our kitchen windowsill in my care for a whole semester was more like certain death for them.
The exact degree of peril they were under fully revealed itself a few weeks ago. The container leading to the “observation of life on land” nearly became the observation of death instead. This little terrarium originally came from a local elementary school. It has a little blue plastic lid to screw on top and sits about 8 inches high and 4 wide. It came with all the dirt to be layered into it in stratified lines that you can see from the outside. There’s a layer that’s chunkier aquarium-rock-sized pebbles for drainage, a layer of rich soil, a layer of something blue, and then another layer of soil on top of that. The set also came with stickers to decorate its walls so there’s a butterfly on the outside along with a few other smaller stickers, and then there was a little red and white spotted mushroom house to sit in the bottom of the terrarium for the plants to grow around.
For a long time, there were small little shoots that would spring up from time to time, but it was mainly cute to look at because of all the other decor, not so much because of the growth inside. She watered these plants about once a week when she was home during the summer and assured me, I could handle taking care of it when she left for Asbury this fall. When I took over that job, I watered it more frequently than she instructed me to (though not intentionally), and the little thing really took off. I woke up one morning and there were what looked like bean sprouts from a salad bar growing all over the place! They were about two inches high and absolutely filled the base of the container, dwarfing the little mushroom house. I took a picture and sent it to her because this plant was not only surviving; it was thriving in my care.
I felt like I’d figured out the secret to this one’s success: more water. Perhaps I’d ended my black-not-green thumb streak. Things went well with the little bean shoots for the next few weeks, some of them growing almost all the way up out of the container. This windowsill sits directly above the sink, so I had the bright idea one morning to water the plants there with the sink’s hose sprayer rather than getting a cup to get the water up to them. That worked great for the heartier plants, but not so much for these tender little fellas. Not only did the pressure of the sprayer tangle them all in and around one another; it also delivered much more water than they needed. Needing to do something quick, I thought it would help to just pour some of the standing water out of the little jar. That was working, a thin line of water trickling out of the terrarium, until I tilted it one degree too far. The layers of dirt and gravel tumbled out and the little tangled mess of bean sprouts jostled all to the side of the container along with the little red mushroom house. I raised the top of the terrarium back up quickly, righted the mushroom, and tried to rearrange the mess so that it looked a little more like it did before I upended it all. I was hoping that the plants would grow through the mess I’d made.
Not only did they grow back, but they also grew back stronger than before. What at first looked like little light green baby bean sprouts now are dark green with frilled edges around the sides of the leaves. The veining pattern of each leaf is also visible where it wasn’t before, and the regrowth doesn’t look frail and fragile. The things growing in the terrarium now look like actual plants, not like the beginning baby-stage of what might someday become a plant. They ARE plants now. I’ve thought of this so many times since watching this play out in our kitchen windowsill. Life, we all know, has a way of upending us from time to time. Bad news of a family member, tragedy in the world, mistakes and bad choices of our own…there are so many ways that our world can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye and all that we’ve worked to create can be jostled and tangled up in a way that leaves us with broken bits to try to rearrange into some semblance of what it all used to be. If that hasn’t happened yet, we can, with a degree of certainty, know that it likely will happen to us at some point.
What we can also be assured of, though, is that not EVEN IN, but ESPECIALLY IN the midst of our mess, God IS, not WILL BE, at work. He is presently up to something that will be for our good even when we can’t see it. 2 Corinthians 12:9 tells us that “[His] grace is sufficient, for [His] power is made perfect in weakness.” Our struggles, in the hands of Jesus, are an opportunity for His abundant grace to overthrow our mess, to un-upend our world, and to set things upright again. The outcome of what He sets aright is so much stronger and more beautiful than what we could establish on our own to begin with. It’s often in the process of growing through the rubble, of coming back up from what looked to be a jostled mess of knotted-up bean sprouts on the bottom of an overturned terrarium, that He fashions us into something that looks far more like Jesus than before the struggle came along. He can take our bean sprouts and make us “oaks of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:3), allowing us to be a small part of “displaying His splendor” through the miracles He works in our lives.
Our mess in the hands of Jesus is a miracle-in-the-making. He’ll take the terrariums of our lives--what we see even if it be death-on-earth--and turn it into a terrarium where we can once again experience a renewed observation of life, a fresh arrangement of the life He is actively designing for us, now and into eternity. His grace is sufficient for whatever upending we experience.
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