Dirt Under Your Nails

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God. I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever. I will thank you forever, because you have done it. I will wait for your name, for it is good, in the presence of the godly. (Psalm 52:8-9)

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me. I'd like to be an olive tree in the house of God, continually feeding on the water of life.

If you've been reading my blog, you know that I spent a lot of time towards the end of the school year being upset about not seeing results for some of my students. I felt like I had worked so hard, and they had worked hard, but we just didn't see all the results we wanted to see. It was then that God started talking to me about gardens.

I know a lot of old-school Southern women who take their gardens very seriously. They have timed sprinklers, picket fences, and many pairs of dirty gardening gloves. They go out and spend all day working in their gardens, and their hard work manifests in beautiful, prize-winning flowers and the juiciest, tastiest tomatoes. (You just can't get those up North, where the soil isn't alluvial...but let me lay biases aside.)

For all their hard work, however, these experienced gardeners can never actually make a plant grow. They can plant seeds, certainly. They can fertilize and weed and water, making an environment most conducive to productivity. They can even sing to their plants. But they cannot, with a magical touch of their supposed "green thumbs," make a seed germinate, sprout, bud, and produce.

We all know who does that. He has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground sprout with grass (Job 38:25-27).

Yeah. The one and only God.

In the same way, we can plant seeds in other human beings. We can sow the word of the Good News to them. We can labor hard over them, sacrificing our sweat and tears in prayer and good works. We can pour out all the living water God gives us, more and more still, to nurture them. We can be faithful to return to them day after day, never growing weary of doing good (Galatians 6:9). But we cannot actually make them grow.

That's the beautiful irony: plants will never grow if someone doesn't plant a garden, and your hard, hard work is essential. Yet it's not essential at all, because God is really doing the work.

I think we should each view our ministry on earth this way. We should always work hard, but we should realize that (thankfully) the produce of the garden does not depend on our work. This is a paradox that is so hard to grasp, and it slips through my fingers every time I try to understand it.

Paul helps a bit:

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers (1 Corinthians 3:5-9).

We are fellow workers with God and each other. In heaven, Jesus isn't going to be running around handing out "lawn of the month" or "garden show finalist" certificates. Here is one of the best things about the garden: it belongs to all of us. Not only are we sowing and watering in it, we are also growing in it ourselves. And the one that both our work and our growth glorifies is our Father.

I tend to like to take my little patch of earth and work in solitude. I don't like having other people trample their booted feet through it or offer me suggestions about what seeds to plant. I don't like to leave it under the care of another. I considered keeping my job a second year for the sole reason that I did not want to leave my kids to be tended by another gardener. I wanted to place a scarecrow and a "Warning: No Trespassing" sign in my classroom. (Not literally...I'm not that crazy.) I especially wanted this because I had not yet seen the total results for many of my students. I saw buds where I wanted to see flowers.

But if you're going to co-labor with God, you're going to have to accept that you might not be the one who gets to reap what you have sown. You have to accept co-laboring with other people.

Jesus said, "Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together, for here the saying holds true, 'One sows and another reaps.' I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor" (John 4:36-38).

That seems a bit unfair at first reading. You may not get to see the results of your work. Or, you may have to wait a very long time to see anything coming up out of the ground. But, as usual, God always pleasantly surprises us, even if we have to wait, with the unexpected beauty and bounty of His plan.

The glory of the harvest is bigger than each of us as individuals receiving "wages" or recognition for what we've done. We will receive these things, but that's not the main point. The object is the glorification of the Father. Our Father's goal is to bless as many of us as possible by calling us to be part of His plan.

And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace (James 3:18).

We work so hard, but at the same time, we're a green olive tree, planted and nourished by the shores of His peace, because [He has] done it.  I can trust that the seeds I planted in my kids will grow for years to come. I worked hard, and my hard work opened the door for the true Gardener to do what He had in mind from the start. No matter how hopeless it looked, or how barren it seemed, in my sight, He is faithful, and He will surely finish it. I was just honored to be chosen as the one to get my hands dirty.

I love being a product of His imagination. Stay tuned for more thoughts about gardens in my next post!