Narrative about gardening

I Am NOT a Gardener


I am not a gardener. Never have been. I used to do the whole flower thing. A few impatiens’s here, a few peonies there. I could never figure out the whole getting back to nature. I like a nice yard; I just wasn’t into all the work, the bugs, the slugs. I have good friends that love it with all their heart. My mother-in-law has tried for years to get me to just start digging around. You’ll like it, she tells me. I just want results. I want to hire someone to come out, dig it up, and then plant and weed for me until the day I can bring someone fresh flowers and say, “They’re from my garden.” Of course, implying that I had anything to do with it.

Then there are the vegetable gardeners. You know who you are. Every year I have a refrigerator full of zucchini. I only like it two ways. Zucchini bread, which my children hate, and corn battered and deep fried. That would be the southerner in me. So basically that leaves me with fifteen zucchini, one of which is always the size of a baseball bat, to throw away before it disintegrates in my vegetable bin. Haven’t any of you heard of grocery stores? They all have their own produce sections where you can go and buy just enough for what you need. They have many nice varieties and they normally don’t come with their own bugs. I want results. I want to give the man my money and take home a salad.

Then about May, I had about two weeks between jobs. Everyone asked me what I was going to do. I said, I think I’ll start a garden. I don’t know why I said this. But the more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to do this. So my vacation got here, my kids and I went down to the seed store, bought our little spades and slug-kill and went home and dug a garden. It wasn’t very big, but it was full of weeds. We raked and we pulled and we cut and we sweated. We drank a lot of iced tea. We talked about what we wanted to grow. We got really tired. We bought plants and seeds and came home and mapped it out. We planted and laughed and named our corn “Bob.” We got really dirty.

We watered and we weeded. We watched as nothing happened. We watched as the dogs ran through and broke our tomatoes. We watched the slugs enjoy our strawberries. We unwound morning glories from our cucumbers.

We got a little bored with it. Our bush beans never came up, but our corn really was knee high by the fourth of July. Our cherry tomatoes took over. We will be able to furnish the entire church with pumpkins this year.

And this last week, we have been enjoying the best sugar snap peas the world has ever seen. We have these little cucumbers that taste a little like heaven.

And as I was snapping my peas off the vine and handing them out to the kids, I realized that it was never about the results. It was all about the journey. This is why people garden. The vegetables are great. They really are better than store bought. Because they’re fresher? Maybe. But I think it’s because of the journey we took to get there.

God was speaking to me out there in my plot of earth. Eating those peas was easy. Getting there was a lot of work. It wasn’t always easy, it wasn’t always fun. But sometimes, time stood still while I was out there, sun shining, a quiet breeze, the satisfying feeling of saving a plant from another nasty weed,

Life is not always easy, it’s not always fun, but sometimes, when you stand in God’s presence, time stands still. When the sun shines on your life just right, the dirt under your fingernails doesn’t seem to matter at all.

Heaven will be sweeter, not in spite of the journey, but because of it.