Sow Seeds of Learning

If you love gardening will agree with me that there are many life lessons one can take from the garden. A few years ago I decided to take on the task of planting and tending a garden. I could never have guessed all the lessons about life I would find myself pondering with my face in the sun and my hands in the earth.

Judith Turner’s herb garden, with a sign that expresses our impatience with nature’s own time. Gardening, she writes, offers many excellent life lessons.

Gardening is good for us in so many ways. If you grow an edible garden, there’s the most obvious way: it provides nutritional, delicious food.

There are also physical benefits to gardening. It has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, it helps us stay flexible through stretching and bending, and it burns calories. Gardening also provides emotional benefits. It eases stress, gives us a quiet place for reflection and contemplation, and it provides comfort, especially during difficult times.

Take any issue or relationship you are struggling with into the garden. Use your garden as an altar to lay these issues before the Lord. As you dig through the soil, clear out weeds and water the garden, reflect and contemplate on these issues and you will notice that you find inspiration to do something positive about them.

Another big lesson I have learnt is that you cannot control everything. No matter how much I learn about gardening, how many videos on YouTube I watch, how many books I read or consult, so that I do everything “right”, something can and will go wrong. And that is just like life: things just happen, we cannot control everything, no matter how much we might think we can.

Mistakes happen, but that doesn’t mean they are failures; it means we are supposed to learn something from them.

When I first started gardening, I had no idea that mint was so invasive and that it would eventually pop up everywhere, outgrowing and overtaking everything else in the herb garden. Now I know that I have to keep an eye on the mint or plant it in separate containers. If I had done nothing about it and still expected a different outcome, it would have been a failed lesson.

I have also learned that if you neglect or ignore things, they will not thrive and live a healthy life, and might even be killed off. This is true for the important relationships in our lives. If we take them for granted by burying ourselves in work, or things, or other people, we hurt these relationships and they will not be healthy and happy, or might even die.

It is very difficult to resuscitate a dead plant. But while there is the slightest sign of life even in the most dormant of plants, there is hope to grow that plant again. It will take patience and a lot of tender love and care, but it will grow again.

And this brings me to another lesson gardening has taught me: to be more patient and to let things happen in their own time. You cannot rush nature’s rhythm and timing. A seed will grow only as fast as it can. Fruit and vegetables will ripen only when it is time for them to ripen. Trying to pressure them into being ready when they are not is futile. Likewise, have patience with the people whom you love and the relationships you want to restore.

Recently when I cleared out my spinach bed, I realised I had no seedlings to fill that empty patch with. No seeds were planted in seedling trays to be ready to be replanted in the big garden. No succession. My spinach patch is empty—there is no spinach to plant.

This again is life, especially organisational life. Who will take over the task? Are young people being prepared to take over important roles in church, organisations and society? The greatest lesson I have learnt is the importance of preparing emerging leaders to take over from us. Because all the lessons we have learnt will be of no use if we do not pass them on to the next generation to continue to grow and prosper.

Sow your seeds wisely, tend them well and wait patiently while enjoying the process and the good things they yield. Happy gardening!