Lessons From The Bamboo

Several years ago, back when I was in high school, I was on the quiz team at the Bedford Christian & Missionary Alliance, and I was involved in CHAT with Ben, Kyle, Seth, and Jamin. In the late summer, I remember my family going out past Pleasantville on the way up to Johnstown to dig up some bunches of bamboo to transplant in front of our house. For some reason I never went along for the actual digging or transport, but I was definitely around to plant the giant, cumbersome stalks.
We had to dig fairly big holes for the gnarly root balls, and after transplanting the bamboo shoots into said holes, we watered them per usual transplanting protocol. However, the bamboo was ornery and unruly, and it refused all our attempts to stand it up straight. It would tip into the street, into the area in front of the house, into other stalks next to it, but it would not stand up--and when it got windy, well, that unleashed a whole new glut of problems! Because of this, we had to build a sort of lashing fence behind it to tie the stalks to and give them more support. That made things a little easier, but by then it was cold and really windy, and the ground was hard and unwilling to accept the intruders.
By the time spring rolled around, that bamboo was looking pretty rough: it was all dry and brown, some of the stalks were split up the length of them, and all in all, the little grove of bamboo looked pitiful and dead. However, they were still standing there and providing a sort of screen, dead or not, so they stayed. Over the time since then, we have planted other things around them, weeded junk out from among them, and pretty much left them to themselves.
This morning, as I was coming back from work at HeBrews and visiting Dad, I noticed that there is significant new growth in our little bamboo grove. There are young leafy shoots pushing their way through the dead stiffs, and they are filling in the area quite nicely now. It is exciting to see that, a reaping of what we sowed so long ago, and it is an example of real life: very few things are immediate, but eventually, whatever is planted will grow in some way or another. For a long time, that row seemed dead, and then this past summer, we noticed a few adventurous shoots wandering down the row past where we had planted the original grove, and here and there some green could be seen among the brown. Now, even several months after that, there is still more new life among what seemed dead. And therein lies something else to be learned: even when circumstances seem bleak, and even dead, keep working around them and in between them, and eventually, sometimes imperceptibly for quite a while, new life and growth and change will occur.