I have dreamt of having a wildflower garden. Yesterday, I purchased a box wild flower seeds. This morning, I grabbed a hoe and a rake to plow the small plot of ground next to my porch. It is northeast Florida ground, filled with little stones and rooted weeds and is dry. I tilled this little patch of ground because it was where I decided to sow my wildflower seeds. With my hands in the dirt, I was pulling weeds, tossing the stones and making room for the seed.
My mind wandered to the tilling that my family and friends did that led me to my relationship with Christ. I was wild growing up. My dad said, “Your boyfriends wear more makeup and have longer hair than you!” That was true, they did. They also looked better in black spandex pants! It was the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll. I was a wild flower in the midst of this era.
By my late 20s, I began to deeply seek a relationship with Christ. My spiritual life was similar to the ground I was tilling. It was rocky, filled with weeds, and bone dry. I explored New Age spirituality but found it to have no depth and was not rooted. It had no sustenance. Thankfully, from my childhood onward I heard God’s Word. It was my parent’s Christian tradition in our home growing up that nourished me and gave me spiritual grounding. With unrelenting determination they threw the seeds of the King at me. These seeds appeared through their love (and prayers!), their example of a Christ centered life and Christian community, their routine of living the Christian calendar and, their faithfulness in living the Christian Tradition and through Scripture.
As fortunate as I was, it still took time for the tilling of my own garden to take to God’s Word. Finally the soil was ready, the seed germinated; I heard and I understood. Only then did I come to the point where I knew I was a sinner and Christ was my Savior. The gift remains which is that “the ancient emphasis on union with God accomplished by the incarnate Word in his death and resurrection given us as a gift.” Andrews Purves presents Martin Bucer as one who “speaks an urgent word to pastors today to return with diligence to a pastoral practice that is built upon the whole Word of God, and which is thereby both evangelical in theology and evangelical in practice.” Our call to pastoral care is to relentlessly and continuously sow the seed, not knowing if the soil is rocky or filled with weeds, while the Lord tills the ground to bring the sinner to repentance and then to Glory.