Adventures in Gardening ~ Change

So, my garden is in a new phase. It's straggly. My squash plants died back and I had to trim and clear out a lot of stalks. I'm harvesting cucumber, pumpkin, and tomatoes. But my carrots and watermelon aren't ready yet. Two of my four tomato plants are a blighty, gangly tangle. My dill and cilantro plant appear to have cross pollinated, don't even ask me what that's all about. And after a few days of rain the weeds have staged a takeover. It's a mess.

Today I went out armed and beat back the revolting army of weeds. I pruned some dead vines. Overall I attempted to regain order. Throughout the whole process, while standing on my head in the beating southern sun and humidity, with my hair in my face and ants crawling up my legs, I had company. Our small neighbor children, along with my daughter, were "helping".

As I surveyed my garden, and watched the children spray each other with the hose and pick anything they could get their hands on, I contemplated the course of this enterprise. Where had I gone wrong? How could I improve follow through and productivity? Had I accomplished my goals? What had I learned? Was it worth it?

The parallel between my garden and ministry was striking. So often the garden/program itself becomes so important we don't realize adjustments are necessary. I really need to remove my old tomato cages and re-stake my plants. Old squash plants and pumpkin vines need pulling up; underneath new growth is visible. And I need to consult my gardener's manual again for instruction. That's true in ministry too. Sometimes frameworks need to change and old forms need to be scrapped to make room for new growth. Adjustments need to be made and the manual consulted.

It's wise to learn from, take responsibility for, and then not repeat mistakes. It's also important to take time to enjoy the squeals of laughter and curious faces of our "helpers". So often in church ministry - programs, the building, and budgets - are valued over people. People are messy. My garden serves me and serves as an opportunity to draw my neighbors in, if it takes top priority over them it has to be put in it's place. The same is true at church. The newcomer, unseasoned and raggedy, eager to help, matters. Sometimes programs have run their course, have grown gangly, and stopped producing fruit. Sometimes we have to remember why we do what we do and put people back in their proper place.

Have you seen things in your own life run their course and need changing? How do you respond to that change?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Maturing

I was out of town most of this week and when I came back my garden was full of good things to harvest! I picked squash, rosemary, and jalapeno.

I've learned two things from my little plants this week. The first thing I've learned is that plants mature at different times and require different tending to mature. My squash is going crazy and I've had to do very little to encourage it. I planted it, water it and it has sunlight. Whereas my tomatoes have needed closer tending. I've had to prune them regularly and give them the support of tomato cages. And while I have little green tomatoes growing they're taking longer to mature than the squash, even though they were planted at the same time. Those are just two examples, but all of my plants have grown at different rates and have different needs.

The other thing I've learned is that no matter how beautiful the fruit produced on a plant you still have to pick it. What a waste if the vegetables and herbs are never harvested. The day I came back from the trip my squash plants were full. I picked a basket of them and then again this morning there are several more squash needing harvesting. If I don't do it no one else will and they will rot and be wasted.

I think those are truths in life as well. We mature and grow at different speeds in the church. I'm not talking about believing different things, those are weeds that grow up among us and that's different. I'm talking about people rooted in truth and growing in grace. Sometimes we get impatient forgetting that we mature at different speeds and that some people need more attention than others. Grace is necessary. Those with a more mature faith must bear with, teach, support, encourage, and pray for those whose maturing process needs it. And lest we become prideful we should remember there's always someone bearing with us.

As we've been patient with each other, developing spiritual maturity, we must remember to harvest. If the fruit we, and others, produce isn't used it's wasted. People who have learned to encourage should encourage for the good of the body, those who teach should teach, those gifted at serving should serve, etc. If you know God has equipped you don't shrink back, bless the body with the nourishment that comes from using your gift for their good. And if you see a young Christian needing confidence to share their gift come alongside of them and show them how.

I love learning from my little garden. I'm amazed how time working in the dirt does my heart good. If you've had a garden what lessons have you learned from it?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Inviting

My Garden is pretty. It's welcoming and fresh and green. Things are blooming and happening. Each day something is bigger and more ripe than before. The herbs smell and taste wonderful.

Last night before church the children gathered to look at the garden, oohing and aahing over the growing things We live in the parsonage so children spill out into our yard, the line between home and church blurring, which I love. I told them which plant was what and they were excited about the squash almost ready to pick. I broke off a leaf from different herbs, told them the names, and let them smell their distinct fragrance.

My garden attracts bees and people, birds and butterflies. It's lovely and orderly and alive. Do we, growing things that we are, attract people to the garden of our lives, our families, our churches?

Before church last night I stood in the driveway talking to a neighbor. A young woman with fears, vague memories of a few childhood visits to church, and a hunger for something more than she knows now. As the children swarmed around the garden, she flitted around me, asking questions, hoping, crying. In the last two weeks her children have started crossing the street into our world and joining us for church. She was afraid they were an imposition distracting me from what was important. She doesn't want to disturb "the good thing" we have here and is afraid her family doesn't dress or behave formally enough.

I spoke to her fears as best I could. Seeking to ease and invite. I told her what church is for; we're for her, for her kids, for loving, not for rules or fancy, we're for people. And I told her she was welcome. That God loves her and she matters, that I know life is hard, that I'm here to listen if she needs to talk, that God loves her and Jesus has made a way. She cried and I told her I'm praying. And then I took her children and fed them and smiled at them and her shy little boy rewarded me with a rare grin.

Gardens are for feeding people and adding beauty. Does the garden of our life invite others in, to linger and be nourished, to have life, and be sustained? Is our life an invitation?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Pruning

My adventures in gardening are beginning to pay off. I will be eating squash in no time and my cherry and Roma tomato plants are full of light green orbs!

Maggie, my trusty helper, choosing a tool to dig up some weeds.

The senior pastor at our church is part of a large farming family and has gardened for many years. I'm grateful for the help he's given me with the starting of my little plot. Yesterday he stepped over to the parsonage and we took a look at my garden. He helped me identify "suckers" on my tomato plants, breaking off the little branches at the joint, lightening their load. I had not been as vigorous in pruning as I should have been.

Squash blossom!

A gardening article says this about the need to prune tomato plants: "If unsupported, the increasing weight of filling fruit and multiple side branches forces the plant to lie on the ground. Once the main stem is horizontal, there is an increased tendency to branch. Left to its own devices, a vigorous indeterminate tomato plant can easily cover a 4- by 4-foot area with as many as 10 stems, each 3 to 5 feet long. By season's end, it will be an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle...A properly pruned and supported single-stem tomato plant presents all of its leaves to the sun. Most of the sugar produced is directed to the developing fruit, since the only competition is a single growing tip. The result is large fruits that are steadily produced until frost." (Pruning Tomatoes, Fine Gardening.com)

little Roma tomato!

What an amazing parallel for us to consider. Without the proper support and pruning we will become "an unsightly, impenetrable, disease-wracked tangle" ourselves. And that disease and mess will spread to the rest of the garden, to the family and church we're a part of. Suckers, excess stems shooting out from the main branch, sap the energy required to produce large, healthy, regular fruit. They can also compromise the strength of the main branch. In our lives beliefs and priorities that looked promising, green and flourishing, often turn out not to be.

Commitment to time in God's word and prayer, and relationship with fellow believers, offer us the support we need to avoid sprawling in an unsightly mess. Likewise let's ask our dear Gardener to prune suckers from our lives. In my own life facebook can be a terrible sucker, sapping time and energy from the greater priorities of parenting my children and a devotion to prayer.

What are some of the ways you are lacking support in your life? Have suckers taken over fundamental priorities? If so our faithful Gardener is willing to prune and re-order if we will submit to him. It is his great joy to lift us upright and strip away useless distractions in order to produce in us fruit for the good of the whole body.

Adventures in Gardening ~ Growth

I wonder what it feels to be a seed. A little germ of life tucked into the rich, warm, darkness of soil; life imprinted into my very DNA. Would I be surprised to find my little head poking up into the dazzling sunlight? Would my little green arms lift up in worship, instinctively, because that's what I was created to do?

Tiny watermelon plant

I feel a bit like my little garden seeds stirring to life, waking up to the season of spring. Just when I think I've got this spiritual growth thing figured out another season awaits me right around the bend. I'm thankful. It's really quite an adventure, though often unexpected. Each truth builds upon the last. Each encounter with the living Truth strips back a layer of flesh, leaving me stinging and exhilarated that he would rid me of my useless dead ways and bring to life divine nature in this erratic heart.

I thought I would talk about sisterhood and mentoring for years, that it would be the drum I'd beat for many seasons. And in a way it still is, but the path has shifted and my view has expanded. I find that mentoring relationships, the sisterhood, is a facet of a prism so much more dynamic and brilliant than I could have imagined. Unity. It's what we were made for, oneness with God and with each other. Certainly that's lived out in sister relationships, but unity takes on so many forms. Unity, known and expressed in truth and love, is something I'm digging more deeply into.

I love mentoring. There's little else that excites me as much as connecting on a heart level with other women in the truth of Jesus. I love praying with, caring for, and shepherding women in their own walks with Christ; and I'm so blessed when a godly woman offers to care for me and point me to Jesus too. But this move has shifted my relationships and focus. I used to spend hours, enough to fill a part time work week, mentoring. Now I truly mentor only one young woman. I still seek to encourage many different women through the week in general. And I hope to establish more mentoring relationships over time in our new home, but I also sense God deepening my woman's bent to nurture in a unique way.

The promise of fruit on my little tomato plant

God is beginning to enrich my life with the care not only of younger Christian women but also with the desire to love the broken children of Serbia. It's not a season I had anticipated. But as my head raises to the light of the Sun I adore I feel my fresh arms clap in delight. Where this adventure will take me is beyond my comprehension but one thing I know I don't want to do it alone!

What area of your life is God unexpectedly growing you in? How do you draw other women into the journey you are on?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Seeds

Today little seeds sleep in the dirt of my garden, tucked in the soil, I watch and wait patiently for signs of life. Isn't that so like the seeds of truth we sow in hearts. Those seeds are watered by the Word of God, the sunshine of grace falls warmly, the soil of love nourishes. We patiently, watchfully, prayerfully wait.

It's true in our own lives as well. Sometimes God reminds us of one of his promises, or we're convicted anew by truth we had forgotten or ignored. At first we may not see life springing up in us, or those around us. But the seed of promise grows as we hold fast in faith. The Gardener tends our hearts, pulling out lies, fertilizing with difficult life circumstances, watering with his life giving Word, and the seed begins to grow. Little leaves of hope and joy, faith and obedience poke their heads from the soil of love and flourish.

Patience produces a garden of love, a place of intimacy to walk with the Author of Love; a crop of love to nourish the hearts of the church.

"(Groom) I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk. (Friends) Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love." Song of Song 5:1

Today let's purpose to water the seeds of truth planted deep in our own hearts, and the hearts of our brothers and sisters, to partner with the Gardener in faith. Let's look forward to a bounty of love. How can I pray for you as you hold on to hope?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Commitment

"A successful home garden comes with planning and constant attention! Select the site carefully, plant at the right time, use the right amount of fertilizer, use adapted varieties, control pests; then, harvest at the right time." (The Alabama.)

Oh dear. Maybe I'm in over my head. Even in simple terms gardening sounds complicated. Gardening uncomfortably illuminates my careless nature. I have to ask myself if I'm committed to this process.

What else, I wonder, am I careless about? If I'm hesitant to take great pains to have a successful home garden due to "planning and constant attention" what other areas of my life suffer from lack of constant attention?

My spiritual life is certainly like a garden, really everything in life is spiritual, and I do seek to attend to my walk with Christ. But there is an area more glaring.

For months, even a couple of years, I've been captured by the book of Ephesians and more lately I'm obsessed with Jesus' praying in John 14-17 for the unity of his family. My heart for orphans in Serbia was, and is being, birthed by the prayer "show me your heart God". His heart is love, adopting us, and longing for us to partner with him in loving one another.

So often we as Christians, I'm so guilty myself, have not troubled ourselves to learn the hard language of love. We focus on the form, the program, the duty but not the heart. Love is a garden, but it only blooms in community, in relationship.

"Before sea, sky, tree, bird, serpent, there was love: the eternal, infinite, pure love that flowed in and from Father to Son, Son to Spirit, and then back again, round and round, unhindered, unbroken, undiminished, wild and unbridled. The old theologians called this perichoresis, the self-giving dance of the Three-in-One God. God in himself is an entire community of radical love. God in himself is a city on a hill. And the pulse of that city, its lifeblood, is love." (Your Church Is Too Safe, Mark Buchanan)

Boy this gardening is becoming more important than I imagined. Beyond the vegetables I hope to harvest it is growing a new appreciation for the cultivation of a holy life. The huge word in my mind lately is unity and I think Mark Buchanan's new book 'Your Church Is Too Safe' will only fuel that fire.

So where are you in community? Are you scarred from it, running from it, longing for it, or cultivating it?

Adventures in Gardening ~ Thorns

"For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God." Romans 8:20-21

Maggie and I continue digging in our dirt. We haven't planted yet, we're still removing large amounts of grass and rocks from the soil. Hopefully this week we'll add lime and fertilizer and then the seeds will go into the ground!

I was reminded yesterday, as the sun beat down on my neck and droplets formed at my temples, that gardening is done in a fallen world. The curse of sin is seen so clearly as we fight weeds and thorns to grow good things from the ground. It isn't without sweating and getting dirty that good food is grown.

That's true of spiritual gardening as well. Life is lived in a fallen 'garden', truth is often choked out by lies. Healthy relationships don't grow without the hard work of cultivation.

In this world there will always be weeds and thorns, rocky ground, hard soil, bad weather. Right expectations are so important to avoid discouragement and defeat. We, as believers, are not what we will be, the church is not the pure bride she's becoming, this earth is not free of the curse, yet. The day will come when everything in heaven and earth will be made right, the curse will be lifted, the dragon slain. But not today. Today we toil under the curse. Today we cultivate rocky ground. Today we live under the shadow of death.

"But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him." 2 Peter 3:13

Today as we do the hard work of toiling, physically and spiritually, under the curse of sin, let's remember what we look forward to. A home of righteousness and peace! Every golden day overshadowed by a rain cloud, every walk through the dark valley brightened by a surprising ray of sunshine reminds us of the hope of a better day, of the world we were made to live in! We're going home.

Adventures in Gardening ~ Soil

Here in the mild coastal south it's time to get ready for growing. I'm so tickled this year to have my own little garden to tend. Everyone in the family has picked an item to plant and my Maggie girl is thrilled to have a reason to play in the dirt. I am too honestly!

Today a rectangle of rich Alabama soil was tilled in our backyard. The pungent fragrance of rich, dark soil filled my lungs and begged me to get my hands dirty. It was invigorating! Mild and overcast, we worked in a fine mist all day.

Maggie and I worked at raking the grass clumps out of the loosened soil, she was a marvelous help. Along with grass we also found worms, grubs, a cricket and a spider hiding in the fresh turned earth. We cleaned out almost a third; it will take us the rest of the week to clear the grass out of the dirt.

As I was handling the dirt and thinking of all the wonderful things I plan to grow, imagining tiny shoots and later sturdy plants living in that soil, I asked God to teach me. Participating in the rhythm of the created order of things is an opportunity to be inspired by a tangible picture of God's overarching truth.

I was struck today by the fundamental truth that what we root ourselves in matters. Good soil matters, it will effect what grows. Taking the time to remove the grass, fertilize, mix lime in my garden will impact my harvest. I believe that's true of us as well.

"And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots grow down into him, and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness." Colossians 2:6-7

It matters if our lives are rooted in truth, the person of Jesus. It matters if we water our faith with prayer and the Word. The fruit of our lives will be a thankful heart and all kinds of good things growing out of our salvation. Others will be nourished and God will be glorified.

Of course if I'm lazy about my garden, both the spiritual and physical, the result will be quite different. What is your heart rooted in? Is it the rich soil of Jesus, I pray so. Let's allow him to remove the lies that choke the truth from our lives and feed us with his very own self so that we grow strong. I'm looking forward to sharing more about the truth God teaches me on this gardening adventure!