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Message From
the Pastor
Contact Laney
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Message From The Pastor: “Gardening Nurtures Religious Spirit”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
How do oats, peas, beans and barley grow?
I certainly don’t know. Yet nothing gives such inner pleasure and
satisfaction as watching a garden grow. It can do wonders for the
disposition. Even “Mary, Mary quite contrary” probably was easier to get
along with after tending her garden of “silver bells and cockleshells.”
A vegetable garden can be the closest
thing to a free lunch in this world. It costs only pennies. “Gardening can
be a spiritual experience,” says a Mennonite publication. “It helps connect
us with the natural world. It helps us see how nature works.”
It is hard to picture Lord Bertrand
Russell on his knees, digging in the dirt with his hands. The British
philosopher wrote, “Those pleasures that bring us into contact with the life
of the earth have something in them profoundly satisfying. When they end,
the happiness they have brought remains.
“Gardens – of both vegetable and flower
variety – will consume more and more of America’s leisure time,” says a
story on the gardening page of a local newspaper. “Gardening is becoming
more of a family affair as parents look for wholesome activities to pursue
with their children.”
A garden can also be a metaphor for the
beauty of our lives.
Let me tell you the story of three
gardens. One of them grew in the backyard of a Yale professor’s house in
New Haven, CT. The professor was known to comment frequently about its
unusual magnificence. One day, one of his students came to see the garden.
He was astonished to find that it was only a very small garden, no more than
six feet wide, squeezed tightly between two apartment buildings. “How
narrow it is,” said the student. “Yes,” said the professor. Then he
pointed to the sky. “But look how high it is.”
The second garden grew in Boston. It is
known as the Public Garden. It has rolling lawns, a pond where the boats
ride, beautiful flowers, and spreading shade trees. Several years ago,
sewers were laid under the Public Garden. Giant steam shovels dug up vast
amounts of oyster shells – shells by the tens of thousands! Passers-by who
inquired were surprised to learn that those oyster shells were part of a
giant heap of rubble and debris on which their city’s beautiful garden had
been built more than a hundred years before.
The third garden grew in a town in South
Carolina. There is a bus driver who had to wait 15 minutes at the end of
his run in an empty lot in a dirty, rundown part of town. At first, he was
resentful, but then he got an idea. He took tools, plants and flower seeds,
and began to plant a garden. Today, that lot is the prettiest park in town,
and the bus driver cherishes the refreshment that those minutes of waiting
now provide.
How is your garden doing?
See you in church next Sunday,
Rev. R.
Laney Kuhn
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