Rocks in my Garden
June 25, 2010
I haven’t posted in quite some time because I have been busy moving my family from the residence we had lived in for over 20 years to the house I grew up in. Although the move was a short distance, we now have much more privacy and peace of mind. By my calculations I should finish getting everything moved and put away about the time I will be eligible to start collecting Social Security payments. However, I believe that if that program still exists by then, the medium of exchange I will be paid in will be next to worthless.
One of the consequences of the move is that I now have a new, larger garden space. Last fall, I traded an antique farm implement to a friend for him to plow my new garden space. Later he called me and said that he could barely get the plow to work because the spot I picked was full of rocks. He asked if there was ever a building or a barn on that spot as the rocks were large and laid almost on top of each other. There had never been a building there, that is just the nature of the property. I knew the spot would be rocky, but I had no idea how many rocks would be there.
Last fall I hauled 3 pickup truckloads of rock from the 50′ by 100′ space. These were rear-of-the-truck-squatted-down, tires-half-flat truckloads that exhausted me both filling the truck and emptying it also. Some of the rocks in the garden were too heavy to lift into the truck bed and I maneuvered them into a pile beside the garden with my granddaughter’s help, which turned out to be a good opportunity for me to explain the principle of a lever and fulcrum to her.
This spring I didn’t have the time to load and unload the truck, so I collected the rocks in a wheelbarrow and continued dumping them on the pile by the garden. Every time I run the tiller in the garden, I can collect several more wheelbarrow loads of rocks. The rock pile beside the garden is now huge, and it will never go away without the help of mechanized equipment. Several time as I have been cultivating the crops struggling to grow in the garden, I have hit upon the tip of a rock with the hoe. I will try to lift out the rock with my hands only to find that it is much larger than it appears. I then spend quite some time with a pry bar and a shovel, freeing the rock from the ground. One such rock was so large that it took two hours of digging to fully unearth it. It was so heavy that I could barely budge it, and I finally had to wrap a chain around it and drag it out of the garden with my truck.
My previous garden spot had been a garden for many, many years. My grandfather had a garden there, and probably somebody else had one there before him. The soil was well conditioned and easy to till, and what rocks were there were small. I did take it upon myself one garden season to rid the garden of rocks. I put plastic buckets at strategic spots around the garden and as I tilled between the rows, and cultivated the plants, I would pick up the small rocks I found and toss them in the nearest bucket. Of course I never got rid of all the rocks. Anybody who lives in the Appalachian area will understand that. “New” rocks just seem to grow up out of the ground.
I did however preach what I felt at the time was a clever sermon about this experience. Grasping the pulpit firmly, I expounded to those few listening that the rocks in my garden represented the sins in my life. No matter how hard I worked, I would never be able to rid myself completely of sin, but with determined effort, I could get the biggest offenses out of my life and this was what God wanted me to do.
In retrospect, I feel ashamed of that message, and thankfully few gave it much attention. Not the least of my misconceptions at that point was that the condition of the garden space was entirely my doing. I was in fact, standing on the shoulders of other’s hard work and efforts, but claiming it as my own. I felt proud of the condition of the garden space and accepted all of the compliments eagerly. I have often done the same in my spiritual life, claiming righteousness by association because of the church I attend, or the people I am related to and associate with.
My new garden space has shown me my true spiritual condition. I am impossibly flawed and broken. So full of sin that no amount of work in my lifetime can make me presentable. Not only do I have multitudes of flaws easily observable on my surface, but I have huge, deeply rooted sins that I have spent years covering up so that only the tip of them still shows forth to other people. God, of course, sees them all. No amount of works will fix my spiritual garden. A lifetime of diligent casting away of sins will still leave me woefully rocky and unfruitful.
I am at the bottom spiritually. I have no solutions of my own. All of the old platitudes no longer apply or hold any truth. Spiritual advisers who I have great faith in tell me that this is not a bad thing. I have felt for the past few years that I have been losing my faith and my walk with God. I think that what I have been losing is an un-workable system of beliefs present in many denominations, but especially prevalent in the Pentecostal movement.
I have been receiving instruction in the Grace of God for the past few years, and I thought that I understood it. I may have conceptualized it mentally, but I didn’t feel it in the depth of my heart. I hope that I am beginning to fully grasp it now. The folly of my spiritual past mocks me, I pretended to understand complex sections of the Bible, while not understanding how it is that one can be saved.
It is customary in the Pentecostal church for a minister visiting another church to be invited to present a sermon or message. When I was a card-carrying minister, I often worried about being put on the spot and therefore had a few pat sermons, with appropriate scriptures, ready to go. How ironic it is that now that I have discovered I was a pretender to that role, I also know the message to preach. There is, after all, only one message.
