Gardens

I love how the cycle of seasons reminds us of life itself.  Everything that appears to be "coming alive" every spring starts to flourish as the season changes to summer.  It is a great time for growing things.  Gardens grow beyond the little seedlings and start to produce.  The first people God created were placed in the Garden of Eden and given the task of tending it.  There is fulfillment to be found in working the ground.  I, personally, am not great at keeping plants alive, but I have a mother and a mother-in-law who both enjoy and flourish in the garden.   

There is work involved in maintaining a garden.  Work is refreshing and gives us purpose.  Gardens need to be continually tended.  Therefore, it provides an opportunity to exercise with an obvious and immediate result.  I am someone who doesn't enjoy exercise for exercise itself.  For example, if I am walking, I want to go somewhere.  Gardening provides a reason: weeds to be pulled, produce to be picked, and plants to be pruned.  You have the immediate result of a tidy and healthy garden and eventually the resulting produce.  Work is also a way we can worship God.  Even as we do something as simple as tend plants, we can glorify God by caring for those plants.  

Gardening also provides food to eat.  You know exactly how that food was grown, because you grew it.  You know everything that went into fertilizing the soil and how often those plants were watered.  While you cannot control the weather or the abundance of the crop, you can do your best to grow what your family will eat, at least over the summer.  This can be a very cost effective way of providing food for your family.  Sometimes, gardening produces an abundant harvest.  In these situations, freezing or canning can preserve the food for later use in subsequent seasons.  The items in the garden can provide great health benefits as well.  Onions and garlic are good for clearing infection and sickness.  I have put cut onions around the house when we are sick as they will absorb some of the germs or bacteria.  Greens are packed with vitamins, and they have the added benefit of regrowing after they are pruned.  I would love to get to the point of having an abundant harvest, but I'll start small with my daughter growing flowers.   

Fellowship with others can be aided by a garden.  Some of my daughter's enjoyment in gardening is the time spent with her grandmothers.  My husband, likewise, has fond memories of working a garden with his Gran.  We can open up our garden as a place for others to come and work and fellowship together.  Great conversations can happen when our hands are working the ground.  Many hands can also make for a bigger, more abundant garden.  An abundant garden can also provide an opportunity to share that abundance with others.  This allows us to gift food to friends or those in need.  It also provides greater amounts of food that can be prepared and shared.  We can invite more people to share a meal at our table when we have an abundance that the garden provides.

Do you have a garden?  Do you enjoy your work?  Are you using everyday tasks as a means of worshiping God?  Even if you live in an urban area with limited space and ground, consider a work you can do that provides opportunities to worship the Lord and fellowship with others.   Work to cultivate a garden.  Fellowship and share in the production of a garden.  Find rest and retreat in a garden.  If you haven't tried a garden before, maybe this is the summer to start.  Start small, like my flower bed, or a joint plot of land with a few other people, or go all out and till up your whole yard.  Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.