I’ve been avoiding the garden.
It is overgrown and overwhelming and even though the red tomatoes have tempted me, I’ve continued to make the excuse, “Not today.”
The last time I was in the garden, something moved in the weeds, and I startled, afraid of a snake/gopher/opossum/rabid squirrel attacking me in my own garden. (When my husband identified rabbit droppings, my fears were somewhat calmed but then I imagined accidentally stepping on a bunny or worse, disturbing a nest of babies. I have since seen the bunny outside of the garden, still I will not go in it.)
Besides, it is October, even though it feels like June. Humid mornings that linger through the day just enough to make life uncomfortable. I always think October is optimistic to still be harvesting from the garden.
Aren’t gardens a summer thing? I ask myself every fall.
There is also the problem of time and energy. I tell the children that in the summer I can handle taking care of them and the garden/porch plants but when school starts, I have to exchange one of those things for the students at my job and since I would not neglect my children, it is the garden that suffers from my inattention.
But one day this week I stepped outside with a bowl and scissors, thinking I could just reach over the fence for whatever tomatoes might still be edible. I was not hopeful that there would be any harvest at all because, I thought, I deserve to come up empty-handed after letting so much of our garden rot on the vine.
Guilt over the abandoned abundance followed me to the garden and with each soft and rotten tomato I snipped off the vine, my spirits sagged as well. So much waste. How could I let so much of it go to waste?
I focused my attention on what could be salvaged from the safety of outside the garden perimeter. I did not feel like traipsing through the weeds or stepping on rotten veggies or finding a pile of rabbit droppings on the bottom of my shoes. I reached and tugged and snipped.
And this is what I took inside.
It is not a lot by summer standards, but it is more than I expected. The summer growing season was so weird this year that some weeks we pulled less than this out of the garden.
Apparently, we are not finished with the garden yet. Nor is it finished with us.
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I have this same expectation in my approach to God.
He is always there, like the garden in my backyard, but my faith feels a little overgrown and overwhelming these days. It is a tangled mess of weeds and fruitful vines and picking my way through seems like an effort I can’t make right now. I glance that way from time to time, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on other days, and I think about the good fruit that awaits.
Photo by Kevin Fitzgerald on Unsplash
Still, I often say, “Not today.”
And yet when I do venture in the vicinity of my spiritual life, what I find is as surprising as a bowl of ripe tomatoes: there is still fruit and it is abundant.
I used to believe that spirituality was transactional, an exchange, like a sale at a store or a deposit at the bank. What I put in is what I would get out of it and if I didn’t put anything in, I wouldn’t get anything out. Maybe this was based on a parable about talents or maybe it was just what I heard when faith was talked about. Deposit your time and tithe in spiritual things and you will harvest more than what you put in.
There is some truth to this as there is with the garden. If I had been picking the tomatoes for the last few weeks now I would have more usable ones than rotten ones. And it is true that the practice of my beliefs increases the richness of my spiritual life. But it is also true that we do not control the abundance merely by effort.
I do not believe that my soul withers and dies when I neglect the tending of it, that it suddenly rots and there is nothing usable left. If God can turn even a mustard seed into a gigantic tree then even the smallest measure of faith can still grow into something beautiful.
God draws me toward Him like ripe fruit dangling from the vine, and when I finally decide I cannot ignore it or Him anymore, I find myself overwhelmed by an abundance. Of grace. Of love. Of fruit I don’t think I deserve.
All this to say that neglecting your spiritual life or abandoning it for a time does not disqualify you from receiving an abundance of good things. In a story Jesus told about a father and two sons, the son who left and took everything he was owed with him, the one who squandered it all and returned home penniless and ashamed, that same one was the guest of honor at an extravagant banquet. His father lavished him with love.
Our Father does the same.