'What Gardening Can Teach Us About Life with God' Peter White

Soon after my wife and I purchased our first home, I tilled the entire backyard. It was a pretty good size. “You tilled the ENTIRE backyard,” my wife asked. “Well, yeah,” I said, “Now I won’t have to mow it.” “But you’ll have to weed it,” she quipped right back. And so amidst a lot of weeding over the years, I come to find there are quite a few parallels to taking care of a garden and life with God.

When I was really young my dad had kept a garden, mostly to keep the grocery bill in a manageable range. So I have some very early memories lodged in my subconscious from sitting in the freshly tilled dirt and ordered rows of planted seeds. Years later when I was in seminary, I was living in Kentucky, and suddenly found myself swimming in ideas from voices like Sandy Richter and Matthew Sleeth and Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry. I was making all kinds of connections between food and theology, gardening and farming and spirituality.

There’s a quote from the monastics that goes along the lines of, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The same is true of your garden plot. Be in your garden, and your garden will teach you everything. Here just a few things my garden has been teaching me through the years.

Gardening makes me slow down

There’s nothing like waiting for seeds to sprout out of the soil, then waiting for those seedlings to grow into mature plants, and then finally for those plants to bear fruit I can eat. It doesn’t happen overnight. In a world that keeps promising that I can have whatever I want whenever I want, gardening is a constant reminder that good things are worth waiting for.

When it comes to the spiritual life, I don’t arrive all in one fell swoop. Healthy growth is slow. Gardening cultivates my patience. The seed packet tempers my expectations, that if all goes right, it will be a month, two months, three months before I see fruit. I planted asparagus crowns and had to wait three years before something edible came out of the ground. The same can be true of our spiritual disciplines. It may take months, even years, before we see the benefits of them.

Gardening starts with the soil

You don’t have healthy fruit without healthy plants. You don’t have healthy plants without healthy soil. Roots are crucial for a healthy plant. Sure, leaves are pretty, but it’s the unseen roots that determine how successful a plant may be. There’s a lesson there. What’s unseen, buried in dark, is the true measure of what our fruit will look like. Our own initiative in our private devotional life can be the prime indicator of our capacity to be peaceful, joyful, patient, Spirit-filled people.

As Paul writes to the Ephesians, “Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.” Soil needs fertilizer. The best fertilizer is the footprints of the gardener, a person who cares and pays attention. The next best fertilizer is compost, the dead, useless and fruitless parts from last season. Pain, suffering, and wounds can, like compost, be what feeds new life in us. Plants may prove vulnerable to disease because of a lack of some nutrient in the soil. In the same way, if I continually find myself vulnerable to particular sins, is there something out of sync with my “soil,” that space that waters and nourishes my soul?

Weeds have to be taken by the roots

Nature always finds a way. That’s, of course, a lesson I learned from the many times I watched the original Jurassic Park movie. And no matter how intentional I am about a particular vegetable bed, nature always has a way of growing something else there, too. Weeding has to be a consistent discipline. Everything growing in the bed that I didn’t plant is in direct competition for the same soil, nutrients, and sunlight.

If I don’t get the weeds up from the root—if I’m just stripping leaves off the stem or breaking the stem at the ground—they come right back the very next day. It can be this way in my spiritual life as well. In Galatians 5, Paul not only lists the fruit of the Spirit, he also lays out “the desires of the sinful nature,” a litany of soul-weeds. I don’t get to weed the garden once and call it a season. A consistent practice of confession can be one such way of uprooting these destructive weeds.

Peter White

Peter White is a retired professor of ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For 28 of his 33 years at the University he doubled as the Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, an institution that has championed the concept of the "conservation garden," gardens that do well by environmental issues and biodiversity. He is the author of 150 papers and several books, the most recent of which is The World Atlas of Trees and Forests.

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