If you read my last post, you might remember how my friend challenged me to read Luke 8 every day. I have been, despite being tired as all get-out and thinking of how boring and repetitive it is, I have read Luke 8 every day. Today, I started out in the middle of Luke 8, as I had put my bookmark there for some reason. It helped me, because I started out with the story of the possessed man and the pigs that jumped over a cliff. Luke 8 has so much in it, so it was nice to kind of start off there and then come back to the beginning later.
How many times have I read the parable of the sower? (Luke 8:1-15) How often do I know that I need good soil? See I have read this passage a million times, but to what level have I "gotten" this passage? One may never truly know. I do know however, that I hit a realization today about the passage. Perhaps its because I haven't spent much of my life paying attention to gardening, or farming, or anything of the sort. People in this neighborhood where I live pay landscapers that come in pickup trucks during the day while they are at work to do the magic for them. Perhaps I had always thought that was a magic process myself.
At this house, there is no landscape fairy. My dad and his wife mow the lawn, pull the weeds, water and fertilize, etc. My whole family helped out with the mulch, as my dad had rented a wood chipper and did away with all the branches from a tree he cut down in the back yard. I pulled weeds in the front, I have mowed the lawn. This stuff takes work. And it keeps growing back. If you don't watch it, the yard will be full of weeds, the little plastic barriers that keep the grass in the grass and the wood chips in the wood chips comes up, and the plants will take over your yard. Mowing the back yard it takes several attempts to get around the bushes that want to slice your skin open while you mow the grass underneath. The earth is moving, and rocks and other barriers fall over, become loose and need re-adjustment.
I have vague memories of helping my parents in our backyard garden as a child. I know we had one, my grandmother had one, and my aunt had one. We grew cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and corn. My grandmother grew beans that I loved to pick off the vine and eat. My favorite memory is probably feeling the wet mud between my toes, which later was hosed off- kids are not afraid to get dirty. The food from the garden was so good and delicious. It was even more so because we worked for it. We tended the garden, pulling weeds and making sure it had fertilizer and water. My dad had this monster machine that tilled the ground under every year. It was huge in comparison to my child body, and we had to stay far away. It was a monster, consuming the soil and working it hard. This garden took work.
Why am I to think that my "soil" doesn't require work in order to produce fruit? The thing that makes my soil the 4th soil in the parable is how much work I put into this soil. Some people will always be gravel roads. They go to work, watch tv, have a beer, go to bed, and get up and do it again the next day. They aren't very deep, and it shows. They don't have many weeds, but they don't have much fruit either. They keep their grass mowed tight to the ground, letting nothing and no one in. The fence on this land is tall and topped with barbed wire. Maybe even electrified. Some people are deep, but they have so many weeds in their life. Years of depleted soil inherited from generations of bad gardening. They can't tell a good plant from a bad plant. The roots are so entangled, and they continue to think that the problem is the good plant, not the weeds that take over their lives. There is no fence on this land. Those are some extremes.
What is my yard supposed to look like? Well, there is a fence, but also a gate. Regular weeding, watering, and fertilizing happens. This means I need to fertilize with the Word of God. Water with Living Water. Erect boundaries and pull things in my life that might take vital nutrients away from my tree of life. I desire to bear fruit. I need to let the Master Gardener come in. He does much of the work, but I need to work with him, listen to him and do what he says in order to have everything aesthetically pleasing but also full of life and nutrients, producing much fruit.
Do you see what I see? Are you hearing what I hear? I need to work for God's landscaping company. I need to dig around and work my soil. I need to contribute to this, if I don't then someone else will. And the seeds will be snatched before they have a chance to take root. This life isn't easy, its hard work. Its very hard grueling work at times. But once I have the groundwork laid out and a routine in place, its not so bad. Every once and a while I have to rotate my crops, or take a fallow season. Sometimes I have to burn the whole place down so that everything can grow up stronger and more resilient. It kills the undergrowth and gives the good things a chance to really shine. I am going to have to break a sweat, I just can't sit back and watch it happen. This isn't a movie or novel, this is life. This is my garden. What do you see?
No comments:
Post a Comment