Three.Six.Six: Worms & Weeds.

In the 9th grade I spent an entire semesters researching earthworms. Of all the biology topics I could've chosen to spend my semester reading about I'm not entirely sure why I chose worms, but I did. And I quickly found out that in all of scientific history pre-2009 there were only about 4 papers written about worms, so I spent the whole semester reading the same 4 papers that all basically said the same exact thing about worms:

They have like 3 stomachs
They eat dirt
They poop dirt
They are both male and female at the same time, but can't fertilize their own eggs
Too much rain = worms on sidewalks

And there you have it - the incredible simple earthworm. I learned a good deal that semester, well as much as you can from 4 empirical articles, but there's one important life changing outcome of my semester of worms - dirt.

If I had to try to pinpoint when I really starting loving dirt it was probably around the same time I started developing a weird enough interest in worms to study them as a high school freshman. It is nearly impossible to learn about worms and not also learn about dirt. And thus, as my semester's exploration of the earthworm concluded in a ten page paper (the struggle to write that was very, very real) my love for dirt lived on.

(So much so that mom tried to convince me to major in soil science here at Tech - big regret there. More on that later).

Here at Magnolia we created something of a dream for me - we created a really big patch of dirt in our back yard. Last summer we tilled up a part of our backyard and turned it into a vegetable garden and had so many zucchinis we literally made 2 zucchini cakes a week. It was ridiculous. This summer we got to re-till and prep the land entirely by hand. Hard work, don't get me wrong, and very, very dirty, but very, very fun.

I love our garden. It's legitimately one of my absolute favorite places on the planet. You can learn so much from gardening. It connects you to nature and has a billion ways that it is a picture of God.

Today as I was weeding the small section of our garden that was not lucky enough to receive weed resistant paper there were a million different things running through my head. But I kept coming back to the idea that my garden is a battleground. I am constantly fighting the weeds for possession of that one paper-less corner. The stray cats that inhabit our backyard are always mistaking the garden for a litter box. The sun is murderous to by little vegetables, but too much water is also killer. But don't get me wrong, those plants are resilient little guys. Just like my garden in a battleground, so is my heart. The weeds are sin, it pops up everywhere. Even when I spend hours pulling weeds out of the garden I can't get them all, and when I come back in the morning there will be even more. I can spend my whole life trying to pull all the sin out of my heart, but I'll never get all of it. I'll turn around and encounter and act on more sin in my heart. I will seek out things that bring me spiritual death, that scorch and starve my soul, or that drown it in excess.

God loves me like a love my garden. He finds joy working and shaping my heart the way that I find joy in working this dirt with my hands. Life comes from this worm and weed infested dirt, and he makes life spring forth from my sin infested heart. He wants to help me rid my heart of the sin that is crowding out the work that he's doing and has become rooted so deep.

By the end of the summer my roommates and I will have been able to enjoy a bountiful harvest of yellow squash, zucchini, cucumber, peas, watermelon, and cantaloupe that we raised and tended to with our own hands. That we nurtured and loved.

I need to learn to trust that I have a God that wants to nurture and feed my soul, and weed my heart of sin, and wants to see me grow and has a bountiful harvest in store for me. I need to learn to be a little bit more like our zucchini plants, and do what I was created for - trust in my God and be in a relationship with him that includes me being fully reliant on him, I can't weed my own heart, and I can't force myself to grow.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. 2 He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes[a] so that it will be even more fruitful. 3 You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. 4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me."