4 Weeks & Growing

       "Week 4–5 

Chemicals produced by the embryo stop the woman's menstrual cycle. Neurogenesis is underway, showing brain activity at about the 6th week.^[3] "The heart will begin to beat around the same time. Limb buds appear where the arms and legs will grow later. Organogenesis begins. The head represents about one half of the embryo's axial length, and more than half of the embryo's mass. The brain develops into five areas. Tissue formation occurs that develops into the vertebra and some other bones. The heart starts to beat and blood starts to flow.^[2] "

^{--Wikipedia/Human Embryo}

<sup>From Zygote to Blastocyte to full bore Embryo, I am on a fast train to knowing who I am and why I'm here.  Eight more months of Your creative hand developing all my inward parts, and at this 4 week moment, a spine which is fighting the enemy of our souls to enjoy maximal tissue build up; maximal reinforcement; maximal flexibility; maximal capability to sustain a cross weighed down by a fallen world.  By then, LORD, will you have lasared some light on how one overcomes a lifetime of self criticism & self deprication?  While you extend the formation of my wee, little spine, shoot heavy doses of endorphins into the brain stem while you're at it, please, that the train of all my thoughts would aim always You-ward.


I am praying for something less than conventional when the sun rises eight months hence, on my 50th.  I hope for too much, I fear.  Healing perhaps,  full & complete?  An end to this constant haunting awareness of certain people's bad opinion of me.  An end to the generational curses of my family line: anger, pride, arrogance, laziness, fear, lack of sound judgement.  Julie Slattery said on a recent broadcast that "we're all addicted to pride."  Described it as the one addiction that everyone has in common.  A pan-humanity epidemic curse. It is possible to become truly humble?</sup>

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As inconsistent as it seems, today's gardening activities defy the nature of my present, delicate embryonic frame: I clipped in half 2 grasshoppers with pruning shears and flushed a third down the toilet.  I think I'm some kind of gardening titan when I snag a little enemy bugsoldier with my bare hands and march him off to his doom in my highpressure flush-o-matic. Not the sympathetic,  pro-LIFE sensitivity you'd expect to find in a conservative bohemian such as myself.}

<sup>On my first day of volunteering at the Arboretum last Feb., I nabbed a huge brown grasshoppery fellow while listening to my supervisor's instructions. Force of habit, I guess. I asked her if she had a compost pile nearby where I could dispose of it.  "No, just let it go. We're pretty natural around here; circle of life and all that..." She did not think me a garden titan.  "OK!" I said, but what I was THINKING was "... not in my back yard.  If my yard's to remain pesticide free, some kinda pest control compromise has to happen. And looking at my little crop of purple basil, peppers, tomato, herbs, squash & melon, you'd think I sprayed regularly. Very few signs of bug munching on the foilage.  

(There is this one pest getting ready to pounce, however:</sup> 

[ file:///Users/el/Desktop/monsterNymphs.tomatoplant.jpeg ]

<sup>I spent the better part of my garden day trying to Google-identify these ornery looking pests swarming a tomato stem.  


Somehow (as if I don't know how), while surfing garden sites and the UC Cooperative Extension service,  I became totally engrossed in someone's Africa blog and the next thing I know, it's hours later and I'm sponsoring a Maureen and a David, wide-eyed preschoolers, darling to behold.  I rejoice that I live in paradise and NOT Kenya.  I exult in God's deliverance of team members pursued by angry mobs during 2007 election riots. Oh, dear God. Bless and protect the obedient souls at Transformed International.  AMEN.)</sup>