When God Breaks the Ground of Our Heart
Few pastimes walk the "reward vs. frustration" tightrope as precariously as gardening. (If you don't garden and are considering it, email me, and I will be happy to provide a list of alternative hobbies that will not cause you to lose sleep worrying about how ineffective you are at coaxing food from the dirt.) The joy of watching something grow from a seed in a paper packet to a real, live, edible thing is hard to rival. The other side of that coin is the feeling you get standing over the lone melon you painstakingly managed to shepherd from a sprout to "almost ripeness," only to see it ruined by a single, well-placed peck from a bird. The tightrope is real.
It's been several years since we planted a garden. It used to be something my wife and I loved to do together, and some of my favorite memories have happened in and around gardens. We had gardens at our first rental home and then again at our first house. (We planted too many pepper plants one year and ate canned peppers on every salad and sandwich for about 12 months). I remember my wife's grandfather's massive garden; he was a Baptist pastor for four decades, and his garden was his way to decompress. I remember when it was time to plant, I would help him drag the gas-powered tiller from its home under a tarp beneath the pine trees (where it, perplexingly, stayed year-round) and the half-hour it took to get it cranked for the initial turning over of the soil. I remember laughing at my brother's off-the-wall organic gardening theories and shaking my head at the new tip he was utilizing to get the most out of what he had planted.
I was reading Jeremiah recently, and a passage caught my attention. Jeremiah 31 is essentially a list of promises God gives his people through the prophet. It is a passage of great hope; after experiencing God's judgment for their rebellion, God promises to one day gather the dispersed exiles and reconcile them back into his good graces. Amidst this long list of assurances, there is a promise from God that is powerful in its simplicity.
In Jeremiah 31:12, God promises that for the returned exile,
"Their life will be like an irrigated garden."
I live in Alabama, surrounded by creeks, streams, and lakes. This promise doesn't sing to me like it would for its original audience. For the Israelite living in an arid environment, an irrigated garden symbolized a richness and abundance that is easy for us to miss. This was God promising that they wouldn't merely survive but that they would thrive under the banner of his tender mercy. And this is AFTER they had repeatedly turned from Him and sought other gods.
When I read this verse, I thought of my own life and my own heart. Don't we all sometimes need the soil of our hearts turned over?
It's easy to knock the Old Testament Israelites. Their idolatry and rebelliousness were so brazen. They forsook their covenantal first love and went after false gods, erecting places of worship to do so. Their rebellion was so obvious, so overstated. We recoil in judgment when we consider their shared history with God. "How could they turn from Him after all He had done for them? The Red Sea? Manna from heaven? Saul, and David, and Solomon?" And yet we know in our hearts we are just as rebellious. It's just that the altars of our false gods are easier to disguise.
We worship fame, materialism, pleasure, laziness, comfort, entertainment, self (boy, do we worship self), and on and on and on. Our hearts are every bit as prone to wander as the Israelites, and we have less of an excuse. We have the complete revelation of Scripture at our fingertips.
God looked at rebellious Israel and didn't shy away from the discipline they duly deserved. But, like He always does, He promised that redemption would follow. The end of discipline, after all, is a chastening meant to return us to a right relationship with God. God promised His people that He would provide for them once again—not just the bare minimum, but a life like a well-tended, flourishing garden.
I want God to do what it takes in me to make my life flourish. Don't you? Don't you crave the upheaval that comes when God breaks the ground of your hardened soul, as potentially uncomfortable as it can be?
There is so much potential in a seed, so much of the miraculous. But seeds can't grow in dormant, dry soil. Plants thrive in an irrigated garden, where the gardener has prepared the ground, removing the rocks and weeds and bringing in water and nutrients. When it's done under an expert gardener's steady, knowing hand, what once was unfertile soil is left teeming with new life.
What if we were bold enough to ask the Gardener to make our lives "an irrigated garden"? What if, instead of being satisfied with a dry and dusty faith, we welcomed the hard work of the tilling to experience the wonder of the harvest? After all, the best part of gardening is sharing the fruit with others. Isn't that what we want from our lives, for God's glory?
This article originally appeared in Volume 37 of my free newsletter, Good For You.
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