It’s amazing what one can learn in a vegetable garden. Until last year I hadn’t the slightest urge to plant one. And frankly, were it not for my wife’s passion and perseverance I doubt it would ever have come into fruition. I’m just not one of those folks who get excited about playing with dirt and slapping mosquitoes on a hot summer day. But, she usually gets what she wants and she wanted a vegetable garden. So, that’s what she got. I knew it would be a learning experience for us both, but never dreamed it would yield all that it did.
Last year was our first attempt at growing vegetables and to the amusement of many, neither of us had a clue as to what we were doing. Nonetheless, after some friends helped us break ground we poured out our little packets of seed into rows until they were all underground and then prayed for the Lord’s blessing. I already knew if something edible was going to come up out of MY yard it was going to take an act of God. That’s when it really hit home that food wasn’t produced on the shelves of air-conditioned grocery stores. I thought instead of continuing to depend on large corporations for something to eat it might behoove us to shift our reliance more heavenward for such basic needs. It caused to me to consider just how much better our lives might be if we all spent more time in vegetable gardens than we did in grocery stores. Just last week while staring into a tiny surveillance camera mounted six inches from my face at a local Kroger, I fed twenty dollar bills to an express checkout machine and reflected on what a genius my wife was to suggest we grow our own vegetables at home.
I learned from that vegetable garden to appreciate rainy days…not just tolerate them but pray for and celebrate them as a blessing from above. When I was growing up in the city thirty some odd years ago I dreaded rainy days mostly because they messed up my clean car and adventurous agenda. Not being the least bit interested in the needs of farmers and ranchers, I wanted to see a sunny sky all day every day. After all, the food I ate came from those happy faces wearing aprons at Kroger, Luby’s and Taco Bell not some stranger wearing overalls out in a Kansas field…or so I thought. However, by the summer of my mid-forties I had become quite fond of watching weather reports and radar loops for approaching storms. These days I actually get excited when dark clouds begin gathering overhead.
I know it sounds strange, but shouldn’t it be the same with our spiritual lives? If we didn’t have a few stormy days along the way, how would we ever grow up to be the living sacrifice God calls us to be? If life was perpetually sunny how could we possibly appreciate the wonder and joy of God’s love, power, compassion, mercy, grace and deliverance? If Hollywood has taught us anything over the last fifty years, it’s that leisurely lives and carefree days without any challenges or convictions are more often than not filled with emptiness, confusion, unhappiness and despair. Yet, that is precisely what the majority of us today strive and long for here in the 21st century. Like wealth, it’s just a cruel mirage that incessantly appears on the horizon only to elude us. Perhaps we should count that a blessing from God as well.
As it turned out my wife and I had a pretty good crop that first year…that is, for a couple of rookie sodbusters. Our corn wasn’t much to look at or brag about, but it SURE tasted good knowing it had come from our own little garden. Not only were we fed by the vegetables we harvested, we were nourished by the truths we reaped in the process.
Our education continued this year with our second garden. When the seed was all planted we prayed over it just as we had the year before and got almost a month of unusually heavy rain and magnificent growth. After a few weeks though, I got lazy, complacent and distracted by other things. I suppose I thought to myself “Hey, we prayed over the garden so I’ll just trust the Lord to take care of it for me until I can get around to working in it again.” Maybe I didn’t say those exact words, but essentially that’s the theology I embraced. We seem to do that a lot these days with our duties, commitments and responsibilities, don’t we?
Well, something strange began to happen…or maybe I should say something strange began NOT happening. The rain stopped. In three weeks I went from getting quite possibly the most rain in the entire state to getting almost no rain at all! I don’t mean it quit raining in my region of the country or in the state of Tennessee. I mean it quit raining RIGHT HERE in my little corner of the county. Record storms lit up the radar screen all around me day after day and week after week, but always died out right before they got here, regardless of the direction they were coming from. Eventually, I became concerned enough to stroll over to the garden and take a look to make sure everything was OK. What I saw when I got there taught me a lesson I’ll not soon forget.
The fruit of my flippancy was a superb crop of weeds that almost dwarfed everything my wife and I had planted. From a distance, all of that lush greenery in my garden looked like tomato plants, corn stalks, lima beans and green beans…not weeds. You see I kept putting off and excusing myself from tending to it until the whole thing had become one big embarrassing mess. Sure, I had been praying for rain like we all pray for blessing after blessing after blessing, but I was ignoring the weeds! In doing so, I made myself the master and God the servant until my repeated requests for rain were no holier than calling Dominoes for a pizza. Upon realizing this, the servant humbly climbed down off the throne, apologized to his Master, grabbed his little garden hoe and hurried back to work on the weeds. Guess what? The next day it poured. Go figure…
I guess I’m a slow learner, but it finally dawned on me that the weeds in our garden are a lot like the sins in our life, both individually and collectively. They always seem to grow and multiply right along with our arrogance and indifference. We can ignore them, make jokes about them and rationalize each one right out of our conscience by doing nothing more than paying lip service to God each Sunday with generic prayers like, “Lord bless us and forgive us of our many sins” and never confess or repent of a single one. Is it any wonder so many of our churches today are in the condition they’re in? From a distance they appear to be producing a magnificent harvest, yet with closer examination we soberly discover that they are only filling up with weeds.
Yes, It’s amazing what one can learn in a vegetable garden. I learned that day that the Lord doesn’t shower His blessings upon us when we ignore the weeds.
What’s growing in your garden? Maybe it’s time for a closer look.
“Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20)
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