Tilling the Soil

I’ve had a chorus I learned at Urbana years ago running through my mind lately:

Grow something new in our lives oh God.

Grow something peaceful, grow something true.

Grow something new in our lives oh God.

Grow something new. Turn our hope back to you.

The lettuce in our garden turned bitter a few weeks ago, and there was a lot of it. The plants had grown huge – wide and leafy and tall – and didn’t taste right anymore. We needed the space to plant something new. So I spent a hot Saturday morning pulling out and shaking the dirt off and composting all of the plants.

And the next week, Peter and I planted bean seeds. He raked the soil to soften it and we carefully marked our rows and took turns digging and putting the seeds in place and covering them with the dirt. Later we watered them, since the day was hot, and made sure the sprinkling hose was working so they would continue to be watered. And then we waited, and I wondered and worried about whether or not they would grow. Was it too late in the season? Too hot? Did we put them deep enough? Too deep? I’m not a very confident gardener.

But last Saturday night I saw them – the bean plants! About 6 inches high. When I showed Peter the next day, he noticed that one of the plants still had the seed on top – now opened and dried in the sun. It will be a few weeks yet till we get beans – they have more growing to do – but I’m hopeful and thankful.

And as I was praying about what to write about this week, the song and the image of the bean plant with the seed on top kept coming to mind. And with it the question – what seeds are you planting?

Last night I read the tributes to Congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis in the most recent Time Magazine. This paragraph from the article “Marching Orders” by Brittany Packnett Cunningham caught my attention:

No matter the work we do, all of us are clear: we stand on the precipice of transformation now because people like John Lewis tilled the soil. Though this transformation may seem sudden to those who are not ardent students of Black history, the seedlings of freedom have been planted over generations. Any change is the direct result of persistent freedom work and hands that never left the plow. Amongst the greatest to farm the lands of liberation, John Lewis sits high in the American canon of heroes because his blood and tears watered the ground on which we now stand.

What seeds are you planting? Are we planting?

The first midweek reflection Jay sent out back in March was about how the pandemic is a time for change, for transformation: a time to consider what in our lives we want to change and what we want to hold on to. As the summer comes closer to its end and the pandemic is lasting a lot longer than I had naively hoped, I find myself revisiting those questions. What do I want to change? What’s bitter and needs to come out? And what do I want to plant, to nurture?

And of course we don’t do any of the work of planting or nurturing or harvesting alone. We work in community, the communion of saints that includes heroes like John Lewis. And it’s God who makes things grow – we can’t transform ourselves. And yet it’s good to step back and look at our gardens from time to time and ask, what seeds am I planting? And what new thing, by God’s grace, is growing in me? In us? In our world?