Does It Really Make a Difference?

Often it feels my life revolves around a small piece of earth across the street from my home. About seven years ago our meeting planted the first Compassion Garden in a strip of land between the parking lots of the Presbyterian Church and our Friends meeting house. It started as a project to help the youth of our meeting raise money to support a Compassion Child in Africa and ended up becoming an institution in our neighborhood and small city.

I live in an urban area and options for growing vegetables are limited. For years our church mowed a strip of land between the parking lots that grew only stickers and weeds. With an idea from the World Ark magazine from Heifer, International the idea of an urban garden was planted. For seven years we’ve grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, pumpkins and other vegetables in that unused piece of earth. Every weekend we harvest the produce and put it in bowls at each church for a donation to the Compassion Garden. And for six years, donations have paid for a young girl’s education in Uganda. In addition to the fresh produce harvested on the weekends, I’ve been able to make gallons of pickles, fresh salsa, and jalapeño jelly from mid week harvests that are used for donations to peace projects. So, from May to September much of my time and energy is focused on the Compassion Garden.

Last year the Presbyterians improved the garden area with landscaping rock. This leveled our garden and helped with water retention. I thought the garden was going to be the best ever last year. About 4 weeks after planting seedlings, I panicked. It appeared the pepper plants were dying and the cucumbers on the Presbyterian side were a quarter of the size of the cucumbers on the Friends side. In desperation I dug up one of the plants and discovered landscapers placed clay underneath the mulch. I managed to save some of the plants by replacing a bit of the clay with top soil, but I was sick that this beautiful improvement to the garden ended up costing us produce.

This spring we spent several days digging out the clay and replacing it with topsoil and composted manure. I have great hopes this year will be my bumper crop. But this crop will come with a heavy price. It was incredible work to dig out the clay and bring in new soil. The work (and poor spring weather) delayed the planting of this year’s crop. And the project took the work of many, many people to complete. But I learned some great lessons.

This past Memorial Day, my husband, Ron, and I took a road trip to Kansas to participate in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first monthly meeting of Hutchinson Friends Church. Ron, his brother and parents were among the first members. The celebration was a great day of reunions with former young Friends now scattered all across the United States. It was a great day to remember the heritage of the first pastors, Lowell and Josephine Thornburg and their leading to start this meeting in Hutchinson. They spent 22 years as pastors there. I was moved to hear individual after individual witness to their spiritual journey beginning on that piece of earth and the influence of that faith community on their lives. Ron reminded those gathered the beginnings of this faith community were not just 50 years ago, but Hutchinson Friends stood on the shoulders of Friends who for over 350 years made their passion for Christ visible in our world.

I believe our Friends Churches and meetings have been planted in good soil. Our faith community handed down ways of expressing passion for Christ through the testimony of their lives. A concern for evangelism, the practice of simplicity, peace, integrity, community and equality express this passion in tangible, visible ways. The faith community in Hutchinson, Kansas continued this tradition and their passion nurtured a generation of people who now invest their lives and energy making a difference in our world. The good soil that Lowell and Josephine nurtured now nurtures another generation to know and follow the Living Christ.

I am blessed with my connectedness to this good soil and our Quaker Christian heritage. It is a living heritage with an emphasis on faith and practice. My earliest awakenings to God and Christ created a desire for my faith to be lived out through what I do, through what I say and how I live. I guess I always believed a relationship with Christ should and would make a difference in our world. But to be honest, sometimes I wonder if what I do and how I live really does make a difference. Living with integrity and living simply is hard work and I fail too often. Living in community and proclaiming peace is often discouraging and unappreciated. Sometimes no matter how hard I work or how far I extend myself to help others experience Christ, know Christ, or care about a Christian witness in our culture today....it makes little difference in how they live or the choices they make. Does my passion for trying to live out my faith really matter?

The Compassion Garden reminded me this year the real work in my life needs to be spent on building good soil and a healthy foundation. It always amazed me the poor clay soil wouldn’t grow vegetables, but would produce a healthy crop of weeds. Something will grow from the soil of our lives and we have a choice in what we plant and nurture. I am thankful for the faithfulness of Lowell and Josephine Thornburg – their lives nurtured and grew a generation of people who knew God and who walk with Christ. But Lowell and Josephine were surrounded and helped by a faith community who sacrificed and cared as much as they did about the witness of Christ on that piece of earth. Their collective lives were a visible witness to what is important in our world: to live with integrity and simplicity and to care deeply about people’s relationship with God and Christ and each other.

In my world this makes sense. It is too easy to become preoccupied with appearances when our attention is drawn to what is visible: the vegetation that grows, the produce harvested from the garden, the beautiful landscaping, the mulch on top. It is too easy to work for what looks good and not for what is Godly. It is too easy to be like everyone else and not be like Christ. And it is too easy to get sucked into planting our American Culture and not the Kingdom of God. A good foundation of rich, healthy soil in which to plant our vegetables, composted manure to give nourishment to the plants, and rain from above to sustain life is at times ignored or overlooked. The work to nurture the soil in the Compassion Garden this year reminded me the real work in my walk with God is to nurture and sustain a foundation centered in Christ. If I work to plant Godly things in my life, God is faithful and the good soil, the Light, and the Spirit from above will produce good things.

I hope the good soil across the street and the hard work by so many to nurture it this year makes a difference for our Compassion child in Uganda. I know a good foundation made a difference in the man I’ve been married to for 32 years. I want my relationship with Christ, my marriage, my ministry and my care for the earth and the little patch of it across the street to make a difference someday.....to someone. But really, that isn’t my purpose on earth. My call isn’t to make a difference, but to be faithful, to love God, and to put my faith into practice. And that makes sense.

PS. In case anyone is interested, I harvested my first cucumber yesterday....