Chaos Gardening
This week, as the ice has melted and the sun has been shining, I’ve found myself in several conversations about gardening, which brought me back to one of my favorite theological lessons!
Like so many folks in the world, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, I too picked up a new hobby. It wasn’t Zoom movie night or baking sourdough. I didn’t build a home gym or get a new pandemic pet. I started gardening for the first time in my life. I had a raised bed built in my backyard, and I started to learn about how to make vegetables grow in the Memphis summer heat.
Now, I am a lifelong brown thumb, which is essentially the opposite of a green thumb. A brown thumb is someone who not only doesn’t know much about cultivating plants, but also can be someone like me, who has long had a knack for killing plants, even when operating with good intent or following seemingly simple plant care instructions.
Deciding to grow vegetables was pretty far outside of my comfort zone and skill set. However, everyone kept saying “2020 is a year for new things,” so I dug in. Literally. After the first summer, I learned a great deal about the art of gardening. I grew a ton of tomatoes and cucumbers, a few Japanese eggplants, some carrots, and lots of string beans. I never could quite get the squash or watermelon going that first year. I learned that there were critters who would steal my tomatoes if I didn’t pick them at just the right moment. And most of all, I learned that I could in fact grow a plant, despite all the houseplants looking down from heaven and shaking a an angry leaf at me!
So, in the summer of 2021, I doubled down. I moved to more fully claim my identity as gardener and I had a second raised bed built so that I could double my harvest, and perhaps even boastfully start giving excess away to my neighbors and friends. I added a second raised bed in my yard, and here is where things got interesting. After procuring all of my baby plants and neatly planting them in rows in the first bed, I had no remaining seedlings for the second bed. So I ran out to the store and I bought a whole bunch of seeds in packets – green peppers, snow peas, carrots, cauliflower, purple kale, jalapeños, and I think I even accidentally grabbed a packet of wildflowers in my dash to the checkout line. I was short on time that afternoon, so into the soil they all went – no proper distancing considerations, no organization, AND no labeling. After all the careful planning of my first raised bed, my second bed, due to time constraints and a little bit of impatience, became an exercise in what I have come to term “chaos gardening.” Throw the seeds in the ground, add water, and let’s see what happens!
The funny thing is, the chaos garden bed produced just as a much beautiful produce that year as the carefully planned garden bed. Some of the tomatoes from the chaos garden, actually grew larger and were tastier than the ones in the more ordered garden. I don’t know why or how, but chaos gardening actually worked!
Chaos gardening has become an important analogy for me as I seek to live a life of faith in a world that values certainty, calculation, and predictability. Chaos gardening feels a little like an act of rebellion. I know that the instructions say that the tomato plants should be spaced 18-24 inches apart. How dare I dump a whole pile of seeds in a small corner of dirt with no label that tells me that I put them there! Who tosses 20 packets of seeds in a small patch of dirt, adds water and walks away? Who does that?” I mean, Martha Stewart, queen of all things domestic, starts out the gardening section of her website saying, “The first step to being a good gardener is understanding the fundamentals.” I argue that chaos gardening covers the fundamentals. Put seeds in dirt and add water. Check!
There is something exciting about the mystery of not quite knowing what will grow and where. Sure, I walk over to my organized garden bed, look at the little plastic tags in the ground, and say, “Oh my, look! The first strawberries are forming at the same moment the crookneck squash plant has exploded into bright yellow flowers.” As I look at the organized bed and reflect on the faith metaphor, there are a fair number of parallels that can be made when thinking about careful planning, diligence, and organization. These are good attributes for living a faithful life - organizing our worship, our prayer, our study – these can bring us closer to God. But chaos gardening just seems to offer so much more perspective on what it is like to be a person of faith in a complex world. I look at the chaos garden and think, “I don’t know quite what that thing is, but there’s a lot going on there.”
Allow me to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned from chaos gardening.
In the early weeks after setting up my gardens, the two gardens look very different. The plants in the organized garden bed, which start with darling little seedlings, start showing the first signs of fruit. In the chaos garden, where I start from seed packets, I find myself playing a regular game of “Is that from a seed, or is that a weed?” All of the green things sprouting up in the chaos garden are green and about 2-4 inches tall. I suspect that many are weeds, and I try to pull out some of the really obvious imposters – dandelions and clover. But there are many little green sprouts where I am just not sure what they are. So I need to let them grow a little more to see what they do.
Imagine if we applied this same principle to our faith – to those moments where something is emerging in us, but we aren’t quite sure what it is yet, or how it may be useful. Rather than plucking it up and disposing of it, or insisting that we must determine what it is right now, sometimes we just need to let it grow a little more to see what I might turn out to be. Sometimes God plants seeds of faith in us that only emerge from the soil of our souls over time. While we certainly may be more confident in operating from a place of certainty and knowing, sometimes there’s a little mystery in this walk with Jesus. Sometimes faith involves some trusting and waiting to see how the events are going to unfold. I have to have faith that in a couple of weeks, those little green sprouts are going to make themselves known to me – weed or from a seed - but I need to be patient and watch and see what they are becoming.
Chaos gardening reminds me that clarity comes in due time. Sometimes friends come by and want to check out the gardens, usually because they are tired of hearing me say that they should come by and check out the gardens. Now, in the organized garden, I have the little plastic tags in the ground that tell me not only what the plant is, but the varietal as well. I have Cherokee purple tomatoes, hillbilly tomatoes and better boy tomatoes. But, when we walk over to the chaos garden, it’s all a big mystery. I honestly don’t know what 90% of the plants are UNTIL the start bearing fruit. “Ah, that’s a cucumber coming out there! That’s what that was!” If letting the mysterious plant grow, watering it and caring for it along the way is the leap of faith, the fruit that comes out is the clarity that we get for the often somewhat blind confidence along the way. Even when the mysterious green stem of your life feels unclear, continue walking with God in faith, and you will be fruitful. You will see the fruits of your faithful journey and understand what all the growing and watering was for.
This blind faith experience in gardening reminds me of one of my favorite pieces of scripture from Hebrews that reads, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Indeed, by faith our ancestors received approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” I love these words. This text is believed to be written to a predominantly Jewish-Christian audience in Jerusalem – an audience who was facing persecution and possibly were considering returning to their practice of Judaism as a result. The message of the text, which speaks so beautifully to that audience, just as it does to us today, is the encouraging reminder that just because we can’t see God in a particular moment, or understand what God is doing at a particular time, that God is still God – still moving, still in control, and still guiding us, even if we have no idea where we are going!
The final lesson I want to share with you from chaos gardening is that it reaffirms for me that wonderful things can come from the messy, impatient, reckless, and clueless parts of our lives. All that is required sometimes is a little water and nurturing. In my chaos garden bed, my impatience, my wrecklesness and my lack of skill and knowledge doesn’t seem to matter. Things still grow. I still get food from the mess, even though I don’t always know what I did right to make that happen. It’s actually humbling to realize that despite my knack for destroying plants, the plants almost seem to ignore my incompetence and do what they intend to do anyway.
Sometimes we nurture the seeds of our faith intentionally, with great discipline. But other times, even if we supply the bare minimum needed for survival, those seeds can still grow, and bloom, and bear nutritious fruit. God is working in us and through us whether we are organized and have a plan, or whether we are a hot mess.
The mystery of my chaos garden is not unlike the mystery of God. I can’t predict which things I plant will grow and bear fruit from year to year, but I know that some things will. I can’t always tell what is growing until it blooms or bears fruit that I can recognize. It takes a little time, but I usually can figure out whether what is stirring within me is in fact a weed, or something sprouting from a seed that God alone has planted.
I confess to you all that I have had many moments of struggle and pain in the past six months. My city, Memphis, has been struggling and experiencing deep pain in the last six months. And so I share that the practice of gardening reminds me of the power of faith, even when I am steeped in mystery and doubt that feels like chaos. I hang on because I know from our biblical ancestors, and from the experiences of my own life, that God is working – within me and around me. And God is working within you and around you. So add water. Let the sunshine in. Keep the faith. And wait and see what will sprout, grow, and make itself known to you as you continue your faithful journey. It will happen.
Amen.
