My mother gardens. She has gorgeous flower beds. Everywhere.
Zinnias and lilies and hostas and petunias and daffodils and flowers whose
names I’ve never learned. When I was little, our backyard had more sunlight
than it does now, so she also grew green beans and tomatoes and squash and
zucchini and lettuce and herbs.

I remember that garden fondly, and I wanted to recreate it
for our children. I wanted to give them the experience of pulling the strings
off string beans and wiping the dirt off the yellow squash and watching for
bugs and bunnies. I had dreams of our whole family feeling more connected to
the source of our food, even if only on a symbolic level. I envisioned
vegetable casseroles and digging a second plot for more produce next summer.

And then the reality set it. The crab grass.
The abundance of squash–all at once, growing so quickly I couldn’t keep up no
matter how many casseroles we ate. The need for water almost daily. The
tomatoes that never ripened. The parsley. I don’t even like parsley. Or green
beans, for that matter. When we picked them, they sat in a pile in the
refrigerator until they were so shriveled I had to throw them away.

It’s the end of the summer, and I have failed as a gardener:

There are all sorts of reasons. My priorities didn’t include
much time for weeding, for instance. It was easy to dash up the road to the
local farm stand and select juicy fresh tomatoes and peaches and corn. The
vegetable plot was too crowded for Penny and William to join me inside it. And
my pregnancy gave me an excuse to avoid crouching down and tending it all.

But at the end of the day, I just don’t delight in
gardening. And since it is not a necessity, I don’t do it. Next summer, we’ll
let the land return to grass and support the local farm stand even more
frequently.

I don’t want to make too much of my failed attempt here. But
it does strike me that one of the images used throughout the Bible to describe
God is a gardener, with human beings as the plants under his care. One of my
favorite passages comes from Jeremiah 17:7-8:

But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in him. 

He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by
the stream.

?       It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green. ?      

It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.

I may have failed as a gardener. Thankfully, the same isn’t
true on a spiritual level. God is willing to endure the constant tending and
watering and waiting and weeding, that we might grow and bear fruit.