Photo and Commentary ©2023 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, April 23, 2023
Now this is my kind of garden – low maintenance! I love flowers, but weeding can become wearisome. These flowers are apparently perennials, because they were blooming in the same place in our neighbors’ yard last year. A true rock garden!
See below for another neighbors’ planting. We see this cultivated strip when we walk our neighborhood trail. On one side of this particular stretch of the nine-mile trail is the Lake Youngs water reservoir, its property protected by a chain link fence. On the other side are home owners’ backyards, hemmed in by a variety of fencing, with a few fence-less lawns that almost merge with the trail.
This is probably the best-kept border on the trail, a long stretch of various plants with a carpet of fresh bark. I admire its tidiness, but what impresses me even more is the fact that the home owners invest time, money, and energy in planting and neatly maintaining a garden they cannot see. Their fence is one of the tallest along the trail. This garden is solely a gift to those of us who tromp the trail.
G is for Garden, and I have bestowed another G on each of these two gardens. The first low maintenance garden makes me Grin. The second garden makes me think about the Generous nature of its gardeners.
Yesterday was Earth Day, a day “widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national and local policy changes.” *
I appreciate the concern for our planet, the urgent need to take action to protect threatened environments. In the quotation above the word “secular” stood out to me, because I think “religious” people would certainly swell the ranks of those who actively care about our beleaguered planet. A search of the two words “creation care” led me to many Christian organizations who mobilize people to do just that – care for God’s creation.
My mind tends to wander off the trail, and so I find myself thinking about Eden, the first garden described in our earth’s creation. How I would have loved to have witnessed those first Earth Days! Maybe God will show us a replay some day, in the New Earth.
But for now we live in the in between time, in what seems like an endless stretch of years between the first Earth Day and our New Earth Days. But God’s Word promises that the world we know now, filled with wonders and warfare, plenty and plagues, delight and death, will not grind on forever. Our Creator promises to come again, to set things right, and to make all things new.
Meanwhile, we have the privilege of tending our gardens, sharing a grin, and giving generously – the way God gives to us.