What Gardening Can Teach Us About Life with God

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.

Having a plan helps

You can toss a seed packet in the backyard, and there’s a good chance something will grow. Nature knows how to do this. But to have a plan is better. More stuff grows better with some planning and intentionality. Till the ground. Plant during the appropriate season. Space plants apart as needed. Keep plants from freezing. Watch for pests.

Your spiritual life needs a plan. Sure, growth can just happen. But more stuff grows better when you’re paying attention and playing along. Journal. Reflect. Commit to practices. Be accountable to others. You have a part to play.

Gardening requires cooperation, not control

Nature knows what it’s doing because God designed it that way. Try as we might, humans haven’t yet found ways to improve the processes of nature. Grocery stores fool us into thinking anything grows anytime, but gardening teaches us to submit to the seasons. We can cooperate with nature’s processes, but there’s little we can do to control them. Gardening teaches me that I can’t control everything. I can participate in the processes, but I don’t get to be in control.

The Hebrew word for humanity is ‘adam (most English Bibles render it a proper name, Adam), and it’s taken from the word for life-giving, healthy soil, the stuff for growing things in, ‘adamah. There’s an explicit link in the biblical account between humans and soil. We’re made of the same stuff. Productivity and efficiency and control, more often than not, produce unintended consequences in the spiritual life.

Gardening involves paying attention to diversity

A garden can be a wildly diverse place. Tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beans, radishes, cabbages. Leafy greens and crunchy roots. Cool spring and autumn veggies and hot summer veggies. Plants that thrive in the sun and plants that need shade. Plants that need a lot of space and plants you can cluster close together. There are dozens of different varieties of tomatoes. But there’s no one single strategy for growing everything.

I wonder if the practices that cultivate joy in me are the same ones that cultivate self-control. Church community is certainly a diverse environment like a garden. What grows one of us may not grow the rest of us. Centering prayer may be a practice that feeds my soul, but it might not yours. We’re all unique, and our souls all respond to spiritual disciplines in different ways.

Gardening is good for the soul. It helps us slow down. It helps us pay attention. It helps us watch things grow. It helps us shape our imagination to see how we ourselves are growing deeper in the life of God.