The growth
11 years ago we planted a community garden in a vacant lot on a forgotten corner of a broken neighborhood. This lot sat one street away from the house we lived in at the time, and we could sit on our front porch and look over at it.
The city of Columbus had a community garden initiative in which you could rent a vacant city lot for $1 if you committed to putting a garden on it. We had already converted our front yard into garden boxes and desired to expand our urban homesteading efforts so the community could get involved as well.
One of the best memories we have of our time there was when a man, hardened by years and circumstance and likely involved in gang activity, walked by our gardens and was incredulous at the sight of seeing us harvesting tomatoes. This man had never seen a tomato plant growing before!
I’m not sure what rabbit trail led me there, but recently I ended up on Google staring at a beautiful and well maintained garden that sat where ours did 11 years ago.
We only got to garden it for that one summer before we ended up moving to the country. I’ve never really considered what happened to it, but sometime in the past decade it was taken over and made it into something amazing. Our garden didn’t produce much other than weeds and sunflowers, but I was still happy with what we had accomplished over that summer. Now it’s a full blown community garden run by what looks to be a local non profit. It’s well maintained with many raised beds and a beautiful wrought iron fence around it.
It made me think about the seeds that were planted in that summer we were there. More than just some corn and sunflowers, I hope that we planted an idea that this corner could be more than just an overgrown lot. The whole neighborhood has experienced change and revitalization since we moved, and it’s been shocking to see how different it is now. We know that we cannot take credit for any of it though, for as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3: I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.
When I looked back on those 6 or so years we spent in that neighborhood I can see so many things we learned about ourselves and the Lord. I’m grateful for that time but I’ve often felt like we didn’t bring as much light into a dark place as we would have liked. When I see things like this booming garden or the houses that are now fixed up I can’t help but wonder, did God make some seeds that we planted sprout?
It reminds me of another thing that Paul says in the book to the Galatians: Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
We can only guess what will sprout out of the seeds that we are planting on a daily basis. I don’t know what will grow in my kids, what will be smothered, and what will die out. But I can trust that if I plant the seeds, God will water them. What a great burden we are relieved of with this knowledge!
When we lived in Columbus I became a huge fan of the Catholic writer, Dorothy Day. She herself intentionally lived in a poor neighborhood and spent her life helping those with less than she had. It’s only fitting to leave you with one of her great quotes:
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
For reference, here is what the lot looked like a summer or two before we put in the garden.
