My husband and I are both related to gardeners. Stop to visit any of the relatives in these summer months and at some point we’ll all wander out to the garden. We’ll see beautiful flower beds at one stop, half a basement full of basil plants at another, and almost an entire city lot put into vegetables at another. And both our dads have compost piles to die for! All those gardeners love the beauty and the job well-done, and we all love the fruit!
So it is with God, we hear. Picking a fertile hill, creating a well-designed vineyard, planting only the best vines. Showering that vineyard with as much love as all of our gardening relatives combined. So, God’s vines yielding only wild grapes is completely baffling. How can it have happened?
No answer to the why, but we are the what. Somehow we humans have turned into wild grapes. Sour, destructive and messy. Not always, of course, but often enough that God’s garden just isn’t the way God intended.
No solution, but one. Close our eyes, imagine the garden the way the gardener intended, and let the work begin.
Gardening God, prune our messy tendencies, pull up our unjust ways and take them out to the compost, train us again to grow toward the light so that your light can shine on us all. Amen. — VF