Grounded

I'm not a gardener by nature.

I'm not a gardener by nurture, either.

If anything, you can say that I'm a gardener by marriage. On a scale of green to brown, I'm just a thumb.

But I did some gardening this weekend. Memorial Day weekend, being of course National Gardening Weekend. We went and bought plants to plant, we got mulch, we got dirt, we got all sorts of fun things to make our backyard prettier. 

But the majority of my effort was at pulling up some sod so we could plant tomatoes. On my hands and knees ripping up grass that was, quite frankly, just doing its job. I was filthy, sweaty, and tired by the end of that process. But I could look at my work and see the fruits of my labor... a patch of dirt.

But there was sod there, and the sod looked nice. It was green, recently mowed, soft, and altogether good dang grass. And now? Dirt.

Dirty dirt.

Dirt that was not nice looking, not recently mowed, soft (but in a squishy gross way), and altogether just a patch of dirt.

And it looks even nicer in the ground!

There's something about progress where we want to see how nice it looks as its coming together. But that's not what my gardening was the other day. I took something nice and made it worse. That was my progress. That was my labor. That was my sweat. Making something worse.

But the next day we put in some tomatoes, and now what was just some dirt now is dirt with a purpose. It went from being a perfectly fine patch of grass, to an ugly patch of dirt, to something with promise and potential.

Pulling up the sod is hard work that yields ugly results, but it's the only way forward.

I've been thinking about all the sod that needs to be pulled up in our world. Between the Southern Baptist Convention's damning report, and our continued inability to do anything to protect our children, I can't help but think of the ways in which the shallow roots of the status quo need to be ripped out. But when we turn things over like that, it looks ugly. When we uproot our institutions and culture we know that we'll be left with dirt. Nothing is there yet, and what was there is no longer desired. But progress doesn't always look like things getting better. It looks like insufficient things looking much worse to make room for better. 

This is true of broad institutions (and I think every Christian denomination could use a report like this), but it's also true of ourselves. There are so many things that work just well enough to work for us, but what if that's just the sod that needs to be ripped out so we can plant some food? What am I holding on to in my own life that I can get rid of? There are obvious things to point my finger at (I'm looking at you, frivolous scrolling through Facebook), but what more sod can be uprooted?

It's a lot harder to rip up sod to plant a garden than it is to plant on bare ground. As a pastor (and as a church), the hardest thing to do is see something that's working and realize that it needs to end. Not because it was bad, but because there's no room for things to grow. Not because it's barren dirt, but because it's not the land we need. 

I hope my tomatoes bear fruit. They may get blight and give me a meager yield. They may fall down in a thunderstorm. They may just be gross tomatoes. That's a risk you run when you tear up the sod. Maybe you're left with a patch of dirt that just stays dirt. But you lose more when you see 'good enough' as the limits of how far you want to go.

Get dirty today. 

Peace,

Jeff Fox-Kline