You wouldn’t know there’s a garden there. The hillside yawns away from the church building, a tire track trail dipping down and rising again, and there it surprises you, encircled in trees. A well-kept secret, fenced in and guarded by a brilliant red door. Thirty plots sit within, tended by a collective of seasoned gardeners. For most of the year, the plots hold their treasures: vegetation verdant and varied, on trellis and vine, spilling out over the pathways.
My husband has been working at the garden for three years. For 40 dollars a year, he keeps two plots, along with access to the watering system and all the tools he needs, not to mention the know-how of his fellow gardeners. At 28, he is the youngest gardener by decades. It would be difficult to think of a more advantageous position for him; he has garnered and gleaned, learning everything he can of their skills and also their stories.
His first planting season, he was disappointed by a meager output. A series of unfortunate events - bugs, animals, and storms - decimated his plot, after months of careful tending and watering. He stood above it, unsure of how to continue or start again.
A mentor gardener, much older than him, came up with her arms full of leaves from her own plot.
“Isn’t it beautiful how there’s always enough?” She smiled, as she handed over her yield.
He came home and relayed this to me, presenting me with her gift. I was 6 months pregnant, anxious and unmoored. I was suffering from a debilitating scarcity mindset and a period of depression that gave me a lot of trouble envisioning the future. When he repeated her words, I grasped onto them as to a lifeline, while also struggling to believe the sheer possibility they evoked.
“Isn’t it beautiful how there’s always enough?”
I struggled with it then and I struggle with it now. My cynicism rises in response, making a case to the contrary. What would qualify you to proclaim this?
Have I lived enough life to say this?
Our gardener friend has. She’s lived a whole, long life, and says, with no airs or qualifiers, as matter-of-factly as the soil she sifts through: “there is always enough.”
Perhaps her belief is bolstered by her day-in, day-out gardening habit. Perhaps she has come up short plenty a time, only to be met with a neighbor’s remarkable yield. Perhaps she, too, has ached past her limits and still been met by the God who sees her.
This has been a year where I’ve felt my lack. In the face of prolonged physical and mental health issues within my family, I have come to the end of myself again and again. My previously-held concept of “enough” came from a stability that has been jettisoned, a life stretched beyond my capacity to hold it all together.
It hasn’t felt like enough. “It,” being myself and my attempts at answers, my ability to see beyond this season. And yet, my family is still here and we are still held. How? I ask.
“Enough” has arrived unexpectedly. We wouldn’t have needed it or noticed it if we hadn’t been in want. When we have come up short, His grace has continued in increasingly personal and specific ways. In the arms of a friend, a meal delivered, a note or prayer sent at just the right moment. In our year of lack and limitation, he has poured more abundance, meeting our need with the offerings of our community.
Isn’t it beautiful how there’s always enough?
I analyze that up, down, and sideways. I question, “is it true?” “Could it be?” “What do I need to do to make sure that’s the case?”
In response to my existential questions and bargaining and strategizing, God answers with a head of lettuce. In the yawning face of prospective dread, a scarcity mindset that grips and controls, he responds in the yield of a neighbor’s garden, in hands graciously extended. With something to taste and savor, with something to hold onto. He answers in the real what I wrestle with in the abstract.
And His request is that I receive. What humility it requires to acknowledge your own need enough to receive grace and goodness and gift from a neighbor. In meager harvests we meet our limits. In a world arching towards redemption we meet our lack. But there is always enough when it is extended in generosity.
My husband has had many planting seasons since that first. Some have been more fruitful than others, but each have instilled in him and in us the rhythm of the seasons. Sometimes we have received from others, and sometimes we have been able to extend from our own overflow. What a gift, either way.
On Easter morning this year we attended a sunrise service, a stone’s throw from the garden. Afterwards we walked our toddler down the tire tracks and around the plots. She knew where to draw the water from, how to tip the pail so the plants were doused. She walked hand in hand with her father, and that old clenching feeling - that scarcity which trapped me when I was growing her body within my own - was eclipsed by the sun rising through the trees, the brilliance of the resurrection morning, the gifts of our neighbors.
He walks in the garden with us. His arms are full. And He offers us Himself. That is always, always enough.