Tending My Garden

It has turned out to be a much more beautiful day than I anticipated so I took advantage of the weather and took my garden apart. Notice, I didn't say harvest my garden, but took it apart.

In early Spring I decided I wanted to try to garden. So I moved bricks and built a raised bed garden behind the manse. It was a very small garden, which was my intent, just a small garden where we could get some delicious fresh vegetables.

It didn't really work the way I anticipated.

I had great soil brought in from a local farmer's barn. He warned me, "Anything will grow in this stuff." I smiled, envisioning giant tomatoes. I planted my seeds. I watered...occasionally. I watched green shoots sprout up. I marveled at how many little bursts of life were breaking through the soil. I looked closely. They all looked remarkably like grass!

A week went by. I had been right: I had a nice raised, bricked-in patch of grass.

I set about tending it. I pulled the grass. I spent hours pulling grass. And weeds. Weeds had also started to grow. I know so little about gardening that I let the weeds grow to see what fruit they would bear, since those wise words well, are so wise, that we can know something by its fruit. As I weeded I reflected on many such spiritual truths that were evident. Jesus after all practiced his ministry in a predominantly agricultural society. Matthew 13 is a great example of this: there is a parable of the sower, a parable about weeds, even a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven being like a mustard seed. 

What is truth, Pilate wondered, while Jesus stood silently before him. Jesus is the truth. When we come to know Jesus as Lord, we move our lives into him. And he simultaneously lives within us. Our new existence could be likened to a distorted Venn Diagram. Distorted, because there should be no realm of our life (circle) outside of Christ. When we start to live a life of truly abiding in Jesus then we can realize that God communicates his truth continually to us through creation.

In planting a garden we can learn about being rooted in Christ.

In tending the garden we can learn about the dangers those weeds in life pose to us.

And in taking apart a failed garden (repenting?) we can learn something too.

To disassemble my garden, I removed the bricks stacked 3 high and re-stacked them by the house. I was doing this so that the groundskeeper could mow over the garden. Utterly destroy it. There was nothing there to be harvested. As I re-stacked the bricks I realized that in my entire gardening endeavor I had spent more time building up the brick walls then actually tending to the garden. When I had built the walls, before I had planted a single seed, I stood back and admired my work. I thought it looked pretty good. I was focused entirely on outward appearance and neglected to do the real work of tending to what was planted underneath the soil.

I wonder how often in my walk with Christ I spend too much time cultivating an outward image without tending to the real work of those roots of faith buried in my heart? I wonder how many other believers spend too much time building up walls that look pretty without concentrating on creating ideal situations for the Spirit to produce fruit?