Proof God exists.

My wife and I have lived at our current location since we bought the place about 10 years ago. During that time, we've grown several vegetable gardens. In the last couple of years, I've become interested in growing berries because of all their recent super-food hype in the media.

Blackberries were the obvious choice since they are native plants in my area of the country. I have a little 5' x 5' pseudo-raised bed that is now full of blackberry plants. I have a couple of blueberry bushes as well, but they are struggling a bit. I think they'll be fine if they make through this first year.

So I thought a mulberry tree would be a good addition. They grow wild around here and I have fond memories of filling up on mulberries when my friends and I would stumble across a tree on one of our daily summertime excursions. Nevertheless, my wife said no. The dogs were bound to track in mulberry juice and stain the carpet. I suggested another spot that wouldn't be subject to that concern, but no.

It's true that mulberry trees are messy wherever you put one, but I want one. So I said, "We'll let God decide. He can put it wherever He likes if He even thinks I should have one." My wife, being an uber-skeptic where the existence of God is concerned, agreed wholeheartedly since we've never seen a mulberry tree spring up on our property in the 10 years we've lived here.

Okay. So around the first of May, I asked God to give me a mulberry tree and put it where He thought it should be, with the usual caveat that only if it was in sync with His Will. A couple of days ago, as of this writing (around the middle of August), I noticed a two foot tall baby mulberry tree growing in the far corner of our backyard. Neither my wife nor I noticed it while mowing and weed eating which we usually do once a week this time of year, but this year, since it has rained nearly every other day all summer, we've been mowing and weed eating twice a week.

We are both somewhat meticulous when it comes to lawn care, so it was quite unusual for neither one of us to have noticed it. My wife accused me of planting it while she wasn't looking. Obviously, a bird sitting on our fence shit out a mulberry seed from a fruit it had previously eaten somewhere around here, but even my skeptical wife knows the old coincidence card is losing it's luster after repeated timely examples of the power of prayer over the years. So far, she's been unwilling to put forward the proposition of removing it.

Either way, it's looking like I will have mulberries within the next couple of years or so.

UPDATE (9-7-2013): Was looking around the house for any potential problems - just sort of a maintenance check - and found mulberry trees springing up everywhere. One is about 7 feet tall. I don't know how I could have missed it before now, but I somehow did. The naysayers will undoubtedly decry this with assertions of some variation of confirmation bias. Good luck fleshing out that theory. All I can say is: Be careful what you pray for. You just might get it...in spades.

Incontrovertible proof of the existence of God? Not even close. Another scrap of circumstantial evidence for the existence of God to add to the mountain heap that already exists? Absolutely.

UPDATE II (Easter Sunday, 4-16-2017): I only kept three of the Mulberry trees that sprang up (out of around 10). I haven't seen a single one pop up anywhere on my property since, but I just went and checked on the established ones yesterday and two of the three trees that I kept are now about 20 feet tall and loaded with fruit for the first time. BTW, the blueberry bushes didn't make it. Maybe I should have prayed for them.