With spade in hand, I was churning the hard clay dirt now ringed in citrus food. Crawling  backwards on my hands and knees around the trunk of our lemon tree, I bumped into an unexpected object hanging from the tree.
     A lemon!! A hard, large, green lemon. I was elated. That made two lemons on our tree. A tree that had suffered such severe damage from last year’s frost, we weren’t sure it would even survive. It has survived and thrived in producing abundant branches and green leaves–but only one lemon could I find.
     As I scattered the beaded food around the tree earlier, I stared up through the green canopy, just begging for more lemons, but my eyes found none other than the one fruit dangling in the familiar location that drew our eyes.
     I thought to myself, “This is okay. At least we have a tree, and, God willing, we’ll have an abundance of lemons next year–barring another harsh, week- long frost.”
     Turning back to the ground after finding our “new” lemon, I felt another bump. “Oh, it can’t be,” I thought.  Twisting my body around to face backwards and up, I saw another lemon. Then twins hanging on a branch.
     I stopped and began counting the ones that my eyes had not seen before. The count reached 10.  My heart was overjoyed, which seems strange knowing that a few years ago we had a bumper crop of 1500 on that full-sized lemon. Yes, my husband, the engineer, did count them. Those engineers do crazy things with numbers.
     So it was not the quantity that brought me joy, but the surprise from the Lord that we had 10 lemons where only one had existed to our eyes before this.

The Lemon Tree after last year’s frost.

     Surely you have granted him unending blessings and made him glad with the joy of your  presence. Psalm 21:6 NIV

     An afterthought that occurred to me: How often do I see only one fruit in my life’s circumstances as I wait for the Lord’s answer? I lose hope because I don’t realize He has so much more to give me until He opens my eyes.