God continues to teach me lessons through our community garden. In fact, for those who plant churches, you might just want to go out and start a garden and experience the truths and parallels that you find. If you can’t find any, then you probably shouldn’t plant a church. Here are just a few of my recent vegiphanies:

1. Every plant grows differently. Study the plant and find out what it needs. Then nurture it for maximum fruitfulness.

2. Plants need space to grow. At first, the garden seems vacuous, but just wait. When it grows, it will need the space. Then you will wish you had made your garden larger.

3. Be careful you don’t pull the weeds out with the plant. Or, worse yet, when it’s real early and you are a gardening newbie, don’t pull what you think is a weed. It might just be the seedling finally popping through the soil that you are trying to grow. Wait for it to reveal what it really is. This takes time.

4. Don’t plant everything all at once. Plant it gradually, then you have a gradual harvest… unless you are looking to eat an acre of corn all in one week come harvest time.

5. You will need to protect your garden from predators. Get some chicken wire to keep out the rabbits who will steal your fruit.

6. Once fruit shows up, you value it and are more likely to nurture it. Just like when a greater amount of kindness shows up in a former jerk, you treasure it! You need to nurture and praise that kindness!

7. Unless I plant the garden, I could probably care less about the garden. It is much harder to get excited about other people’s gardens. Much more easy to get excited about my own garden. Just the nature of the beast. Encourage people to take care of their gardens.

8. Sometimes people need help and wisdom in gardening, especially if they are new. Figuring out how to plant, water, nurture, fertilize, prune, harvest etc. can be overwhelming, just as faith, repentance, baptism, justification, sanctification, etc, can be overwhelming to one new to faith.

9. New plants don’t attract predators, fruit and vegetation does. Expect the warfare with predators to begin when edible stuff starts showing up.

10. Gardening is just providing the right environment for growth to happen. Nobody grows a plant. It grows all by itself when it is in the right environment. Just like faith.