On Behalf of the 63d RD, Happy Wednesday,
Spring Gardens
1 Corinthians 3:8-9 Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
Spring Gardening is the best time of the year. This is when I miss my large garden the most sitting on my little balcony on the 4th floor. Everyone’s yards around here are very small and few plant to a true gardener’s standard.
When I moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee (TN) in 2004 I asked someone what grows here and they answered, “Nothing grows here.” I obviously was not talking to a gardener. I soon discovered that few gardened in the neighborhood where we bought our home, but that did not detour me from planting.
I planted what I brought with me, and then began to plant whatever I could find in the nursery close to my home. I planted a pear tree that didn’t do well and eventually died. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my back yard had an old French drain system that took all my summer rain and deposited it into my back yard. I planted a peach tree that thrived, but then when they were ripe enough to eat the squirrels picked and ate all of them in one day.
Although I was struggling with fruit trees, my flowers were flourishing in the back yard and in the front yard. Soon neighbors began to slowly plant flowers, pot flowers, and plant trees that flowered all round me. They had caught the bug. I brought the bug with me and established it, and then others around me began to catch that bug. Before I knew it, my neighborhood began to bloom in spring and then throughout the summer months.
By the time I left my second home in Chattanooga, TN in 2017, my garden at my second house on a corner lot, just a couple blocks from the first house I had owned, become a place of distention for others in the neighborhood to walk by and admire. We, as a community had proved that statement spoken, “Nothing grows here,” 13 years prior, wrong.
This is the garden that I miss, the one of my memory, but I look forward to my new purchase in a new neighborhood that is soon to become my home. It comes with a neglected garden. I’ve had to hire a tree service to come in and take out some trees and plants that died or needed removed to let others breath. The yard, over grown with ivy and wisteria vines, had to be pulled down from walls, fences, and from planting beds where it blocked the light to Azalea bushes. At my house in Tennessee I had nothing to work with, and now I have too much growing in the wrong places.
Gardening is a balance between nothingness and abundance. Not everything grows everywhere, but everywhere something grows, even in the deserts. We are much like these places. Someone can give you a negative word about your character or personality, but that negative word does not have to define you or crowd out your soul’s life.
We are fertile ground that is capable of growing beautiful things. All it takes is for one to remove the words, “Nothing Grows Here” and replace ‘Nothing’ with ‘What’ and then find what grows best within you and plant it, cultivate it, and watch it grow until one day someone walks by and notices how beautiful you have become, the beauty that has grown within and around you. For we are God’s coworkers, and you are God’s field. Today is a good day to allow something that you need for living planted within that field.
My prayer for today: Lord, teach us how to be co-workers and help us to trust You to plant within our fields what needs to planted, and then harvested for the benefit of others, amen.
CH (MAJ) Dawn Siebold
Here is the direct email and phone number for anyone requesting support from the 63d RD Chaplain office,
usarmy.usarc.63-rsc.list.chaplain-all-users@mail.mil
650-526-9668