Surprised by volunteers
Two weeks ago, I was in my office getting ready for worship when a church member stopped by with a cherry tomato. A small, single tomato, which he handed to me. Then he pointed out my window toward the front yard of the church. “We’ve got a couple of tomato plants growing out there,” he said. Volunteer plants, we surmised, left over from the small raised-bed garden we’d set up a few years ago, before our garden ministry really took off and we moved it to a much larger plot off site.
“Ah-ha!” I thought to myself, and I thanked Jim for providing the prop I needed for the children’s sermon I was still working out. I’d already planned to talk about the garden; we were doing a blessing for the garden anyway, and any mention of dirt and sunshine goes over well with the kids. But now I had the visual aid that would seal the deal.
When the children’s sermon came, I sat on the steps with the kids and we talked about what it takes to grow a garden. Hard work, soil, sunshine, water. (They knew more details that I did—there was some mention of carbon dioxide and photosynthesis, which is more science than I’ve studied in years.) We talked about how sometimes, all that hard work pays off in a harvest of vegetables, but sometimes, something goes wrong and the plants don’t produce much at all.
