Experiment 5: Plant a garden.
Our Roma tomato plant bears so much fruit, its cage keeps falling over. Once a seed no bigger than a freckle, this green being now branches bush-like with dozens of unwieldy tomatoes pressing towards the earth with weighty gravity. While I attempt to balance the plant, my son gathers cherry tomatoes red as a lady bug’s back. Gathered one by one, they slip beyond his palm into the grass below. This is not to mention the bulbous volunteer tomatoes still a pale green, the eggplants polished violet, the kale so prolific my husband calls it a weed.
Abundance stuns us.
During the pandemic, my husband and I nailed together planks to form two raised beds in a sunny strip of our backyard. Now every spring, I begin the process of planting a garden. Compared to plunking full-grown vegetables into a supermarket cart, gardening is highly inefficient. First comes the dreaming: laying out packs of seeds over the counter and imagining the delights each one could offer, then drawing on paper the garden I hope will flourish in three-dimensional reality. Weeks later, my son and I fill compostable egg cartons with soil, press in the seeds with the tips of our fingers, and drench them in water.
And we wait.
Submission to Growing Rhythms
In the culture I live in, I can get precisely what I want from the grocery store now. If I’m craving kiwi, I can have one peeled and plated soon after a ten-minute drive to Aldi. But gardening teaches me submission. It forces me to submit to powers beyond my control, or even vaguest understanding.
Who can fathom the labors of countless microscopic organisms transforming dead matter into nutrients, of earthworms tunneling pathways for hidden roots, of plant cells spinning energy from sunlight and air?
Unlike a stop at the supermarket, the immeasurably complex processes I depend upon for edible nourishment take months. In what feels like wild faith, I must water a square of blank earth for days, for weeks, before even the narrowest tip of green pierces the earth. As spring shifts to summer, I must wait for leaves to form, then stems, buds, blossoms. I must wait for winged creatures to dispatch pollen grains to minuscule eggs tucked in green ovaries. I must wait (that very long wait!) for green tomatoes to suddenly blush red. I must move in rhythm to the growth of green beings.
Gardens and Grace
What is perhaps most wonderful is the disproportionate grace of it all. From one brittle pod of red Russian kale seeds a friend gave me a few years ago, leafy forests emerge annually. After that first year, I have not planted a single seed. The kale simply appears.
And the year I gave birth to my son, my hands were too full, my mind too sleep-deprived to plant a garden. But to my surprise, green seedlings began to sprout in the untended beds. They grew into a jungle of tomato plants–more than I’d ever had from my painstaking efforts the year before. Flush with tomatoes, we could not eat them all and gave handfuls away. I called it my garden of grace.
Grace is highly inefficient. It gives far beyond what it is given. It lavishes, heedless of expense or cost. It pours out, regardless of the merit of those who receive it.
How much I have to learn from the divine grace glimmering through the nourishing green world God has made!
Grace is also the result of great sacrifice. (My own efforts are hardly worth mentioning. When I garden, I merely participate in a grand orchestration of miraculous life-making that is already at work, regardless of whether I accept the invitation to join in.) Sacrifice is seeded into the creation of life. The grace of flourishing gardens is dependent on so much death: seeds fall to earth and die to bear much fruit. Animals and plants, insects and microscopic organisms decompose to enrich the soil for future living beings. Fruits, leaves, seeds, and roots are devoured in beaks and mouths, so that others might live.
Photo Credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Efficiency calls for saving effort and minimizing cost. Its short-sighted vision aims obsessively at productivity. But grace calls us to expend effort on behalf of those around us, to pour out love like costly perfume over dusty feet. Grace calls us to look beyond the whims and cravings of the moment to the wider, long-term needs of our neighbors: both those who live in our homes and those who live outside them. Grace calls us to extravagantly offer our bodies and minds and hearts, like the holy Jewish carpenter who taught us that by dying we would live.
And somehow–by a strange miracle, by an utterly unearthly logic–the path of grace abounds in leaves that do not wither, fruit that burgeons in season, broad-limbed trees once mustard seeds, so many cherry tomatoes they fall beyond cupped human palms.
For those that fall to the earth as grains of wheat, all these things will be added.
Scripture references: 2 Timothy 4:6, John 12:3, Matthew 16:25, Psalm 1, Matthew 13:31-32, John 12:24, Matthew 6:33
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
