Last night as I was watering my garden, after a particularly dry and breezy day, a neighbor carrying her dog in a front pack stopped mid-conversation with her husband.
“Your garden looks beautiful!” she gushed.
“It’s five years in the making,” I responded. She and her husband chucked and walked on. I’m confident most of them witnessed the desolate wasteland that was my yard for four years.
This is the original yard. The picture is taken from a massive deck built on loose bricks, cement blocks, and railroad ties. There were arborvitae, overgrown trumpet vines, and a weird little fence that did nothing. Essentially, it broke the yard into thirds.
My husband and I moved to Yakima 5 1/2 years ago from raining Portland. I tell people, “God always watered my garden over there,” but here, it’s been a different story. Yakima is a desert. I went from 88 inches of rainfall per year to 8 if we’re lucky. Months go by in the summer without a single droplet of rain.
The summer we reroofed our house, I paid attention. Tre took the old roofing off on June 28th, and he didn’t finish the project until September 11th. We had one rainstorm that summer –thankfully for us before receiving our first fall rain.
After we moved here, the sprinkler system and the irrigation lines both had issues beyond our means. Without water, we saw our own yard become a dustbowl. Our neighbors were concerned about us being a fire hazard; heck — I even thought about having the fire department come and set to blaze what was left: Morning Glories –those suckers will survive the apocalypse.
The hot sun glared down on our barren front yard. The front deck listed to the left, and I wouldn’t let my kids go outside for fear of it falling on them. AND they’d always come in looking like a chicken after a dirt bath.
I knew the neighbors gossiped. I even saw a lady stop her vehicle to gossip about our yard with the neighbor across the street. Their voices echoed on the pavement, and I could hear every word.
“Apparently, they are working on the inside.”
That’s what I’d told her, but the way she relayed it to the drive-by gossiper made it sound like an excuse. We’d worked on our horribly designed front bathroom so we would have a good working bathroom when we started our Airbnb listing.
Fixing up the bathroom was a gut job. It took eleven months; in fact, I grew a human (our second daughter) in the time it took for it to be remodeled. I wasn’t interested in going outside and pulling weeds in the hot sun with a two-year-old and heartburn. Once the lawn died, we knew resurrecting the yard would take a massive effort, so we saved our pennies and tried to lay out a plan for it.
God blessed us with a friend who knew cement and had a Bobcat. We were able to hire him and his crew to help us tear down the listing deck, brick paths, overgrown shrubs, etc.… and build a safe patio for our children to play on. We were able to hire someone to help build a retaining wall on the end of our property too. This helped us level our sloping yard.
Whatever plants we put in our yard, we knew the most important thing for any of it was water. My husband dug long trenches while I nursed our third baby girl, and I kept our two-year-old and five-year-old alive. With the sprinklers in, we began to add life back into our lives.
We hydro-seeded the front yard; I built a hedge and added blueberry bushes, sticker-free blackberry bushes, sticker-free raspberry bushes, along with ever-baring strawberries. We added a few trees, roses, and a front hedge filled with flowers that bloom from spring to fall. We have vegetables mixed in, too, from pumpkins to cucumbers all green –all growing.
So, when I say this garden was five years in the making, it is with complete sincerity. It’s a pretty overused metaphor, but I can’t get over how much gardening applies to our spiritual lives. The health of our front yard has been an active illustration of my own heart.
We moved here, and I thought the life I had built in Portland would carry over here in Yakima. But, it didn’t –relationships ended, I thought went deeper than Sundays, and friendships I thought would grow now that I lived in Yakima fizzled. We couldn’t find a church we both wanted to be at, and I found the hurt I’d experienced at our church in Portland made it hard to embrace any organized religion.
My heart turned into a dustbowl. The babies my body grew sucked every last bit of life out of me. I was so exhausted, depleted, and dry from the inside out. Spiritual nourishment fell like the flash storms in the summertime- desperately needed but didn’t little to quench the insatiable thirst inside.
We all know the line, “If you build it, they will come,” right? Or maybe not… it’s a weird movie about some corn farmer building a baseball diamond on his property for ghost baseball players to come and play. We built the sprinkler system, the retaining wall, and poured the cement without a lick of green on the property.
I prayed to God for healing in my heart. I prayed for a church where I could grow. I prayed for a heart that would be receptive to the Spirit. My prayers laid the framework for my heart, much like laying down the pipes for the sprinklers. We found a church. My spirit is renewed. Our lawn is green.
It’s taken years of excavating, bringing in the right dirt, and getting water to our plants. I do not buy a plant now without a plan. I know without water, even for a few days, my plants will begin to die. My heart, in the same token, needs daily water and feeding to stay healthy and nourished.
So, in application, let’s assess our hearts today: Is your heart dry and brittle? When I see my plants’ leaves start to grow brown and dry, I know they need more water. Some plants need more water than others. How much water do you need, and are you getting it?
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