What’s Growing?

My wife and I and our two little daughters are currently in the process of moving from our home in urban Michigan to the home where I spent my high school years in rural Ohio–a house with lots of land attached and huge opportunities for avid gardeners like my wife and me.

While living in Michigan, we were able to purchase the empty lot next to our house and use the land as a training ground in growing all manner of edible plants. It was an amazing opportunity to meet people in our neighborhood. Passersby would often stop and ask, “What’s growing?” I found myself spending so much time talking that it would sometimes delay me from getting my lettuce in before the sun set. This experience has also been the start of a growing fascination with the world of regenerative agriculture, where farmers look at the process of producing food holistically.

As I think about the move, my mind has been running through all the possibilities the land could afford us as well as the effort and cost of each enterprise. That naturally starts to become a bit overwhelming, so I try to scale back my expectations and focus strategically on how to best spend my time and resources. I know that building healthy soil is always a great place to start. Experience has also taught me that taking on more than I can manage will allow weeds free reign. This causes me to restrain myself when looking through seed catalogs and to really think about what I want to grow.

Recently, I was reading in James and was struck by a gardening metaphor. It felt like an epiphany. Maybe God wanted to use what I had been learning about gardening to convict and instruct me about certain habits in my own life. What caught my attention was this: “Let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life” (James 1:21 MSG).  The picture was clear and beautiful: God is the one who gardens our lives! He tends the soil. He plants the seed of his Word. He grows us into a garden that is both productive and beautiful–healthy, vibrant, and full of life. I long to be a “garden” like this! But this was just the beginning of my trip down the rabbit-hole of biblical gardening metaphors.

Jesus, in the Parable of the Sower, compares good soil to “one who hears the word and understands it” (Matthew 13:23 ESV) or “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart” (Luke 8:15 ESV). So in other words, if our hearts contain good soil, when seeds (the true Word of God) “fall” on us, we hold tight to them! We embrace them fully and also nurture a soul environment in which they can grow and flourish–producing the “salvation-garden” I read about in James. But here’s the thing: there are lots of different kinds of seeds that love to grow in the soil of our hearts. Any time you have bare soil, stuff is going to grow. If you clear the land, weeds are opportunistic and they’ll grow in any soil they have available. That’s why in the world of regenerative agriculture, it’s so important to make sure that soil is always covered–even if it’s only with a mulch or cover crop.

What are “weeds” in our lives? For me, I begin to see weeds of fear, lust, and dejection grow in my heart when I spend too much time devouring the media via news, Facebook, and YouTube. Especially in these troublesome times, the only way to combat these weeds of destruction is by centering our time and affections on the One who desires to make us “like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither” (Psalm 1:3 ESV).