So pretty today, bright and green and HOT when you’re putting pine straw around things. Can’t find my gardening gloves so it’s slow go with the pine straw. That stuff is prickly. I swear that raccoon that opened my plastic box of things on the porch several months ago stole them. I’ve always kept the gloves in that box and they aren’t there. I thought I gathered up the stuff he took out but guess he kept the gloves. He tea partied in the snail killer and the Miracle Grow so he might be scary if he ever he comes back.

So many birds today and the hummingbirds have finally joined the group. My friend told me I needed to change my nectar and soon as I hung the feeders up the hummers started visiting. Thanks for the tip! These are really little hummingbirds. Nobody’s gotten fat yet. Had a big fat one last year that guarded his feeders fiercely.

I’ve been so excited about my little garden outside the lady den windows. I started putting pine straw around the rows of zinnias today. The sunflowers haven’t come up but they’ll show their heads after the rains. I was thrilled, just like a child, when I notice the rows of the tiny zinnias. They are my favorite flower. The vegetables have tripled in size and the lone strawberry is full of little berries.

The summer of Rosie’s death I poured my sorrow into a beautiful little garden and Chief pour his grief into a campaign for the State Board of Education. I created spider webs from twine for the beans to climb and put a brick path through the herb garden. I had rows of sunflowers and zinnias and rows of vegetables. I made a big scarecrow dressed overalls and he held a rusty hand plow. Chief traveled on the weekends and came home full of tales of the people he met. He loved to stop and ask for votes at the motorcycle bars. Those things kept us sane and gave us a purpose to keep going.

Working in the garden I was thinking, we are the gardeners of our faith but God plants the seeds of faith in our hearts. When I’m in the garden it’s so peaceful and I think we feel at home in our gardens because that’s where our faith began, in the Garden of Eden. We know we can’t have a garden without seeds and the seeds won’t grow without good soil, and water, and sunshine. Our Christians faith is the same. We have to nurture our faith and tend it carefully. We have responsibilities in our gardens like we have responsibilities in our spiritual lives. We never plant the weeds but they always show up just like temptation in our Christian lives. Through our prayers and our Bible studies and following God’s teachings, we keep the weeds from taking over.

Jeremiah 17:7-8 reads, “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

The Lord tends to us and nurtures us and helps us grow. His unconditional love is all we need to flourish and put down deep roots in his garden of Christianity. Our spiritual lives are like a plant, rooted in God, growing in his good soil. We also need to scatter our seeds of faith and bring others into God’s garden.

When we commit our hearts and lives to God his grace showers us with love and the promise of eternal life in heaven. Everything we need is right in his hands, in his garden shed in heaven. He will send the sun and the rain and keep the weeds from choking our faith.

“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.” —Alfred Austin