I’m writing this from the folding chair in front of my little vegetable garden, where the surprises and delights of the growing season keep me connected to nature and grounded in God. Summer is my favorite time of the year, and one of the joys for me is comparing notes with friends and neighbors – what’s come up strong (my peppers), what has withered (my Kentucky Colonel mint), what we have too much of, and what we’ve not had enough of. Last week a co-worker shared the classic story of a missed a zucchini under the leaves that grew to gigantic proportions – a reminder that God’s good earth provides in abundance, more than enough to feed every inhabitant of the earth.
The garden teaches me, again and again, the difference between scarcity and enough. Nature doesn’t operate on fear, anxiety, or competition. It just grows. And when we pay attention, the orchard trees heavy with plums and peaches, the scent of tomatoes warmed by the sun, the snap of fresh green beans in our hands – all of it becomes a living parable of God’s generous love.
Gardens also invite us into patience. Nothing ripens overnight (I’m lookin’ at you, heirloom tomato!) We kneel in the dirt, tend what we can, and wait for what only time and God can bring forth. As Barbara Kingsolver writes, hope is a renewable resource – something we find again and again in the ordinary, in the soil, in the season, in the small daily gifts.
So perhaps a spiritual practice of summer is learning to say, “I have enough.” Enough to eat, enough to share, enough to rest in hope and delight in the shadow of Holy abundance. Enough to trust the slow work of God that ripens within us, too.
And if you, dear one, don’t have enough to eat, please be in touch.
With love from the garden,
Anna+
Patient Trust: A Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.