The following article is an excerpt from The Eleventh Hour by Michael Phillips.

Sabina glanced up and smiled at her father.

“Hello, Papa,” she said simply.

“You look deep in thought, my daughter,” replied the baron.

“What have you been reading?”

“The Asher translation you gave me of the Scotsman.”

“Ah yes. Our friend Herr Asher in Berlin does Germans a valuable service with his translations. How do you find the Scot?”

“It is like no book I have ever read, Papa. I would dearly love to try to see if I could read it in the original.”

“I will see what Herr Buchmann can locate for us in his shop. It may be difficult. Foreign publications, especially of the sort of the Scotsman, are not so well thought of in some circles these days. But I will see what can be done, Sabina. I have a number of the English editions in the library, though I’m afraid this is not one of them.”

“Thank you, Papa.”

“What have you just been reading?”

Sabina found her father’s eyes and held them just a moment; then her lips parted in a knowing smile.

“I think I have discovered why you gave me this particular one of his books to read,” she said coyly.

“Do you insinuate I may have had some ulterior motive?” rejoined the baron, with an innocent expression but one that hinted of slyness around the edges of his smile.

“Papa, you knew very well I would find this passage.”

“I can’t imagine what you are talking about.”

“The day you handed me the book you went on and on about our Frühlingsgarten, and then about gardens in general. You told me the older the garden the better you liked it. I know you have not forgotten.”

The baron smiled. “Perhaps I do recall the conversation,” he said.

“I asked you why. You said because sometimes things were buried in older gardens lying dormant under the soil, awaiting a new time to show themselves to the eyes of men and women again. I said you made it sound as though the soil and the seeds and bulbs and roots could think for themselves and decide such things.”

“And I replied that my comment had primarily to do with truths rather than plants.”

“But then, since we were on the subject of gardens,” added Sabina, “you went on to say that though the things in the soil could not think, they were yet expressions of God’s mind, which never stops thinking of creative ways to reveal itself to those who can see it. You said that when God made seeds and soil and plants and trees, he put his own life within them that can never die and is always awaiting just the right opportunity to spring to life and flower again.”

The baron chuckled to himself.

His daughter had bested him at his own clever game!

“You seem to recall the conversation with particular vividness,” he said.

“I remember everything you tell me about the garden, and growing things, Papa.”

Her voice was earnest.

“I am glad, my daughter. All living things have much to tell us of their Maker.”

“Many of which you have told me.” “Mysteries, truths hidden from all but the most diligent and seeking of eyes.”

“Why is it so, Papa? Why would God not want everyone to know all they can about him?”

“He does, Sabina.”

“Why, then, are there so many mysteries? Why are so many things hard to understand?”

“For the same reason that some of a garden’s most spectacular wonders are hidden under the ground for all but a short time of the year, and even then are truly revealed only to those who love them.”

“I do not understand you, Papa.”

The baron walked a few steps, dug a knife out of his pocket, then clipped a stalk from a nearby bush that boasted a bright orange rose, well opened and lush, at its tip. He brought it back and handed it to his daughter as he sat down on the bench beside her.

“Tell me, Sabina,” he said, “is this a spectacular flower?”

“Yes, of course—it’s beautiful.”

“Do you think all of your uncle Otto’s friends in Berlin, at his garden party, do you think they would admire a rose such as this?”

“Yes. They were admiring all the flowers that were in bloom, and all the cut flowers in vases about the grounds too.”

“Do you think they admired them for the same reasons you and I do, or only for the bright colors and pleasant aroma?”

“How do you mean? Do we not love them for their colors and smell too?”

“Of course. But most of all for the deeper truths they have to tell us… their mysteries… their secrets… the glimpses they give us of eternal things.”

“Perhaps you are right. I doubt any of the people at Uncle Otto’s party were thinking of all that when they saw his flowers.”

“People see on different levels, Sabina. There are different kinds of eyes. There are inner eyes and outer eyes. That is why our Lord spoke of people seeing and hearing, but not perceiving. Some people see but don’t see. They hear but don’t hear. All your life I have been trying to train you to truly see, and that is why I brought you here so often when you were young, so that you would learn to love the earth and what the Father brings out of it.”

“In God’s growing things are contained more mysteries and lessons than we will ever know,” said his daughter. “You have told me so many times.”

The baron rose to his feet and walked some distance to a barren spot in one of the rows where the ground had been cultivated and several holes dug for the planting of some new roses. He knelt down, scooped up a handful of earth, then returned to his daughter and sat down.

“What do you see here in my hand, Sabina?”

“Soil.”

“Do you see color, do you smell the perfume of the rose?”

She shook her head.

“Perhaps the beauty of the rose is indeed embodied in the flower you hold in your hand,” he went on.

“But the life, the mystery—they are contained in mine! Now that I have clipped it, that beautiful orange blossom has already begun to die. As long as its roots extend deep into the earth, the plant lives and thrives and continues to bear this most wonderful profusion of color. But take it out of the soil, and instantly the life is gone.” He paused, staring down at his hand. “Look at it,” he said at length.

“What do you see? Nothing but dirt, most would say. Place it on a woman’s dress, or upon the floor of our drawing room, or upon a plate at our dinner table, and we would stare aghast.”

Sabina could not help laughing at the images her father had conjured up in her mind.

“It is even an object of scorn and ridicule. We purge it from our homes and our clothes, and before we eat of the vegetables of your mother’s garden, we carefully wash off all traces of residue of the ground. Curious, is it not, that this low, despised commodity we call dirt should be the transmitter of very life itself to everything that grows on the face of God’s earth?”

“I’ve never thought of that before.”

“God often hides life in the most out-of-the-way, hidden places, even in those things, such as this filthy black soil, that are looked upon with contempt.”

They sat a moment in silence.

Then Herr von Dortmann rose, threw the handful of earth back into the hole whence it had come, and said, “Come, Sabina—there’s something else I want to show you.”

She rose, took his arm, and followed him, out of the garden, along the pathway leading down the hill, and toward the fields, now ripening under the blazing summer’s sun. They walked a short distance amongst the grasses of wheat, then rye.

He clipped several heads of each, as she had seen him do dozens of times every year, at each stage of the grain’s development, then led her along the dirt road, around the eastward slope of the knoll, toward the cow barns and animal pens. They made a stop at the chicken shed, where the baron found an egg that had been missed that morning by the kitchen helpers. It was forty minutes later before they were again seated at the bench in the rose garden, both breathing freely and flushed from the heat and the exertion of the climb back up the hill.

Sabina knew her father well. She knew now was the time for her to be silent and wait. Many things were revolving in his mind, and he would tell her when he was ready. If she became impatient, the thoughts now brewing within him might not reach fruition and she might never be privileged to hear them. She loved to see this process at work, and loved him a little more deeply every time she was thus able to drink of his wisdom.

– Excerpted from pages 42-46 of The Eleventh Hour by Michael Phillips