During early summer of 2021, we (and by we, I mean my husband) decided to construct raised garden beds behind our house. Our backyard is extremely sloped and requires a two-story deck with many stairs to get from our main level down to the grassy area below. The spot chosen has a good amount of sunlight and is enclosed by a fence, preventing the frequently visiting deer family from munching on any of the “crops”. This location would provide both the provision and the protection that plants need to flourish.
My husband and son planted a variety of fruits and vegetables in the three rectangular gardens. The plants were fertilized and watered per the local nursery’s recommendations and my husband’s research. With the deck layout as it is, gardening had to be intentional. We didn’t just organically happen to be down on the lower level, we had to tend to it with purpose.
Despite careful planning and maintenance, the bounty produced that summer was pretty bleak. With an air of discouragement, the garden beds were disassembled at the end of the season.
About eight months later, my husband comes up from the lower area, after trimming the grass and pulling weeds, exclaiming that what had looked like weeds, were actually rogue cucumber plants blooming! Even though the raised beds had been removed and no one was “tending the garden”, the seeds planted a year earlier were now producing.
This gardening experience reminded me of the verse in Matthew 13:23 “But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”
The act and art of parenting is often compared to this process of planting seeds. When the boys were young, I tried to do all the “right things”- prayer before school, meals and bedtime, Sunday School, Awana, vacation bible school, youth groups, etc. I tried to show them an example of what it looked to have a relationship with God.
But, given that my example is an earthly one, it is not without flaws. Like the raised bed garden situation, I have not been perfect in the way I have presented God to my children. I have stumbled in my own walk and not always been as intentional in my teaching as I could have been.
I pray, that like the cucumber crop that came about even though we did not tend the garden perfectly, my children’s lives will still bear the fruit of the seeds I planted years ago. And even if they wander away from that internal compass (as my older one has), I pray that they find their way back and hold tight to the wisdom and love that is deep in their roots just waiting to bloom.
Proverbs 22:6 Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old, they will not turn from it.