It isn’t every morning I get to enjoy my cup of French press coffee out on my patio, but this morning the cool breeze and birdsong beckoned me for a half hour of reflection among the hydrangeas and drift roses.
One of the first things I did when I moved to my townhouse three years ago was to hire a local garden designer. The space held potential but lacked design or cohesion: a few random shrubs, a clematis vine, and a stand of lilies. Together, we devised a plan. Along with two workmen, the designer helped me tear things out and install rock pavers, line the path to the gate with bricks, and literally put down roots in a new chapter of my life.
When my newlywed sister and her husband purchased their first home as a short sale eight years ago, they saw its obvious flaws, but they didn’t let that deter them from its potential. They also didn’t wait until everything was perfectly remodeled on the house before they began transforming the ramshackle yard into their own corner of paradise.
I was a teen when my love for gardening first sprouted. I could not have chosen less hospitable ground for the site of my first herb garden: a mound of rocky earth surrounding an abandoned cistern in my grandad’s vegetable garden. My mother helped me hack through the jungle of Johnson grass and trumpet vine, lay a terrace of red brick, break up the fallow soil, and coax my sage and basil to life under the Oklahoma sun. Another site proved similarly hostile; wielding a pick-axe, I ousted a weathered, rotten-looking stump. It took the better part of two days, and I spent the third resting my sprained arm.
There is little my mother, sister, and I enjoy more than strolling through a botanical garden. Pristine boxwood hedges, hosta plants the size of a kitchen table, and towering trees evoke Eden, the way the world should be: peaceful, tended, orderly, and beautiful. One of our favorites, Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, spans over a thousand acres and evokes the gardens of Europe. Before it became a botanical garden, it was wilderness and then a Quaker farm. Longwood’s transformation didn’t happen overnight or even in a few seasons. It has taken years, decades, vision, and hard work.
Could this be a metaphor for spiritual transformation in our own lives? In the beginning, God planted a garden and put Adam and Eve there to tend it. We know the story well: their disobedience led to their expulsion, shattering their relationship with God. Aren’t we all trying to find our way back to the Garden in one way or another?
It was naïve of me, but I had the idea that if I worked with professionals on my garden installation, I could just sit back and enjoy the garden. I enjoy the garden on mornings like this one, but the reality is that it still needs regular tending. Weeds sprout. Hydrangeas need water. Spirea shrubs need to be moved to the sunny side of the house to thrive. Roses need fertilizer. It turns out my little bit of Eden takes some work to maintain.
Sometimes we expect God to achieve our spiritual transformation in an instant. And He can certainly do so if He chooses! Similarly, we want the circumstances of our lives to be perfect. Yet, God calls us into His economy of grace where the conditions for transformation exist. He calls us to partner with Him in plowing up the fallow ground of our hearts and tearing out the tares (or weeds) through prayer and fasting. He calls us to root and ground ourselves in the love of Christ (Eph. 3:17-19), to love our neighbor as we love ourselves (Mark 12:31), and act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with Him (Micah 6:8).
Like the work it takes to plant and tend a garden, our transformation often feels tedious and arduous. It takes time, seasons, years, and decades. We are all too aware that we aren’t in Eden anymore. The world is broken. Our lives are broken. We are broken. While we might not be called to tend a literal garden, we are called to tend the garden of our hearts, our families, our churches, and the garden of our neighborhood and community.
Thankfully, the story of life in the garden didn’t end in Genesis. Because of Jesus’ obedience in the garden of Gethsemane and beyond, we all have the hope of being restored to fellowship with our Creator, who is in the process of making all things new. The conditional promises He makes to His covenant people in Isaiah 58:11 apply to us through Jesus Christ: “And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.”
May you be like a well-watered garden, and may you draw with joy from the well of salvation. God bless you!
Rebecca Newton Abbit resides and gardens in Saint Charles, Missouri. A writer and marketing professional by day, she moonlights as a Urshan Graduate School of Theology student and attends The Sanctuary in Hazelwood.
