Fertile Ground, part 7

Garden Clubs

Since I know absolutely no one outside of our church or Christian family, when our small town started up a garden club recently it suited my purpose to join. I attended the first meeting with some trepidation. Pictured in my mind was a gaggle of women in pastel dresses, hats covered in flowers and white gloves to the elbows sipping weak tea out of dainty china cups as they discussed the latest cultivars of geranium to be added to their porch collection. In my version of gardening, I drag 600 feet of hose around and plant trees with a loader tractor. I break spades on a regular basis and I am always sweaty and filthy. I did not think I would have anything in common with the other members of this club.
Perhaps I have been reading too much (as if!), but I was immediately relieved upon arrival. We met in the Ag department of the local high school and there was not one dress, flowery hat or pair of gloves to be seen. Some of the immediate plans for the club are: landscaping some of the local parks, having lectures on topics like pests, pruning, and wind erosion prevention and sharing perennials badly in need of dividing with other members. This is going to be a good thing. I am meeting people not only with the common bond of a love of gardening, but also with the willingness to get down and dirty in order to get the job done.
As I scrutinize gardening and compare it to our spiritual life and search for practical applications, I keep running into two repeating themes. They are hard work and a zeal for the unwanted task. Perhaps our Lord intended for the Christian life to be simple, but I don’t think he ever intended it to be easy. So much of what we need to do to maintain our spiritual integrity is just plain hard. It takes toil and pain and grief and sacrifice and no small amount of diligence and patience. It also means getting our hands dirty, and I don’t mean with sin, but rather with sinners. Discussing different cults or popular trends that fly in the face of Scripture in our Sunday School classes is all well and good, but only if we take what we learn and share it. Solving the problems of homelessness, drug abuse and teen age pregnancy around the coffee table is no solution at all. We need to open the sheltered havens that we have created for our families and let others in. We need to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them. We need to risk being hurt in order to reach out.
Yes, our Lord Jesus set aside time with the disciples to refresh himself. He spent time alone in prayer with his Father. But the example that we see is that most of the time, he was out with the people. He was touching the leprosy to heal it. He was being rejected by his own family. He was dying for us all.
What kind of influence do we want to have? What kind of example do we want our children to see in us: Pretty but with no real use, or a little on the grubby side but infinitely practical? In cultivating souls for Christ, what kind of garden club are you in?