The sermon a week ago was about patience.

I started to quietly laugh when First Presbyterian pastor Chuck Hasty launched into the sermon.

I can't even spell patience without the assistance of spellcheck.

The pastor, as it turns out, is not a man of great patience, either.

Over the last week, I have thought about his sermon. I have thought about what it takes to be patient. It is not easy for me.

When I want something, I want it now. During the time since his sermon, I have found my own living example why patience is so important.

Which brings us to our Broadway garden a couple of blocks off downtown. Friday morning, I was working the garden, using city water because there has been little rain over the last two weeks.

You know, city water costs a little more than the free stuff.

As I was pouring the water on the tomatoes, corn and squash, I noticed a baby watermelon.

I am not kidding, it was the size of a pecan, which is somewhat ironic because pecans are what that land produced for decades.

I checked on the watermelon again Saturday. It was a little bigger but still not much larger than it was the day before.

I repeated the practice Sunday and Monday -- and the melon is growing nowhere near as fast as my expectations. I figure, by the end of the week, I will be carrying a knife and salt with me into the melon patch.

But that is how I am wired. I have seen the fruit -- now I am ready to eat it.

Forget that it is probably going to be closer to the Fourth of July than Memorial Day when we are busting open that Crimson Sweet melon.

I blame it on growing up during a time when there was an explosion of fast-food restaurants. As a teenager, I could walk into McDonald's, order a cheeseburger, fries and a shake, and I was eating that cheeseburger, fries and shake in a couple of minutes.

No lag time.

Unfortunately, life comes with plenty of lag time.

As I walked the garden Monday morning, it was obvious that my patience will be richly rewarded. The tomatoes are loading up. The corn has begun to tassel. The squash and cucumbers are producing with the promise of more to come.

When you walk through a garden that is on the verge of producing, it is nature's way of telling you to be patient.

In time, all things will come.

Before I walked out of the garden, I went back to take another look at my baby watermelon -- hoping against hope that the water I had put on it was already taking hold.

It looked just as it had 30 minutes earlier.

But you can bet I checked out the watermelon this morning before I went to work.

This is going to be the summer of patience, and the teacher is going to be a watermelon.

Chuck Williams, metro editor of, can be reached at chwilliams@ledger-enquirer.com