These last few weeks some fellow volunteers and I have been doing garden trainings. We’ve held these at the homes of different families, many who have children who have had or currently have malnutrition. By sharing with them simple ways to improve their gardens (i.e. digging deeper, enriching the soil, pulling weeds, and planting (and then eating) nutritious vegetables), we’re building on what they already know and helping them to help themselves.
Last season in my own garden I planted lettuce, something I can never find in my local market here. It grew great and I enjoyed many a salad. Eventually a few remaining plants went to seed. I didn’t pull them, but instead enjoyed watching the life cycle, and was surprised by the almost broccoli looking form it took. In due course, it was time to replant and when I went to pull out the remaining lettuce stalks (they were no longer heads) I was met by a great surprise. I didn’t need to replant. The lettuce had sprinkled its seeds in the soil itself and plants were already growing…in abundance!
I’d planted, but then they’d grown and multiplied. That’s just what I hope for the gardens we plant and the skills we share. That they will grow and multiply and produce an abundant harvest. I hope this for the plants of course, but also for the smiles and the encouraging words.
The story of Jonah and the big fish is well known, but as I reread it, the end of the book was what really stood out to me.
Jonah 4:5-11: Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. So the LORD God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah's head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, "Death is better to me than life." Then God said to Jonah, "Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?" And he said, "I have good reason to be angry, even to death." Then the LORD said, "You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. "Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?"
“And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.” It’s easy to get excited about plants growing, change comes quickly and it’s easy to see that a difference has been made. In lives and hearts it can be a little harder to see, but don’t give up. Remember the compassion of the Lord, His faithfulness and love. How glad I am that this world is in the hands of the Gracious God instead of the Jonah and what a delight it is to get to be a gardener.
James 3:17 & 18, “But the wisdom from above is first pure, the peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”
I made a similar delivery at the prison (where young children stay with their mothers until the age of three, and sometimes longer if they have nowhere else to go.) And my last stop was the hospital, with erasable drawing boards.
...where family, friends and frosty weather are missed, but Christ’s birth is celebrated with fun traditions and a joyful heart.
