Garden musings

Yesterday I dug over a patch of soil at the end of our garden which grows weeds in abundance. Every 2 months or so, I have to dig it over and weed every imaginable thing out of it. The previous owners of our property had dug lots of compost into the soil, so it will grow anything!

At 7am, as I filled a bag with “who knows what” weeds, a thought struck me. The Bible says Adam was made from the earth. As I looked at all the messy roots in my hands, which I HADN’T PLANTED, I wondered about spiritual parallels. Correctly nurtured, spiritually our lives can be like abundantly fertile soil; the type which you could plant a computer in and you could grow a whole network. Left unattended spiritually, you have to spend a lot more time digging out weeds which choke all the good stuff you would like to plant and grow there.

Sometimes in my garden I find beautiful flowers growing one year, which I know I didn’t plant. They mysteriously appear to adorn the flower beds, and I am left to scratch my head and think “How the heck did that get there?”

I wonder if God does something similar? If we keep our lives fertile with a good understanding and love of the Bible and worship of God, then He can in turn plant anything in us and cause it to grow.

I am also struck by the variety of life that lives in soil which has been left fallow. A farmer will tell you that a field left to rest is more abundant when the time comes to plant it. It isn’t until you dig it ready for planting that you see what “insect /worm busyness” has been going on underneath, preparing the deep fertility for seeds to grow.

Ultimately, the earth that we are made from returns to the earth. I ask myself, when my days here are finished, what will live on and prosper out of what I have sown into the days given to me.