The Community Garden at Tenth Church is taking shape and sharing Jesus’ love through relationship building when we garden together with the weekly guests from the Out of the Cold and Oasis meal programs.
This year at Tenth Church, the focus is “Sharing the Presence: expressing Jesus’ love to others. We want our relationship with God to express itself in our relationships with others—in the way we live, what we do, and what we say.”
I was invited to write about 200 words about how I share Jesus’ love through my work at A Rocha, but specifically through the Community Garden. It helped me to sit down and articulate how I have been gifted with this desire to provide a space where people can experience Creation, and ultimately God the Creator, through our act of land stewardship in an urban context. Please read my story below.
Dare I say, “The Best Place to Seek God is in the Garden?”
Well, it’s not my exact words (George Bernard Shaw’s), but my affinity for the garden as a place one can encounter the presence of God stems from my personal experience of gardening—performing important tasks of planting, watering, weeding, harvesting and pruning. I’ve come to learn how God can use the practice of cultivating land as one way to bring us into a deeper interaction with Him. Especially when reading God’s words, I constantly draw from my gardening experiences that bring agricultural references in the Bible to life!
Currently in my work with A Rocha Canada, coordinating our Community Garden Network, I have the privilege of helping Christians develop Community Gardens that facilitate the full expression of the gospel in our neighborhoods and places of worship.
At Tenth Church, I have the opportunity, with a volunteer garden team, to create a Community Garden space that models a practical out-working of biblical stewardship: caring for God’s creation through tending and restoring it. The garden is not merely to produce food for our Out-of-the-Cold and Oasis meals, but a means to restore the broken relationships of our human disconnection to the land and to each other. We also have a great opportunity to connect with people who do not worship Christ!—especially those who may perceive Christians as exploiters of our world’s resources doing so out of a biblical mandate.
There are a lot of reasons one can make for the case on how the Garden allows us to “Share the Presence.” For me, the Community Garden is one way to channel Jesus’ love and desire to care for people on the margins who are oppressed by our current economic system by growing good local food with and for them! In the same way, when we take the time to tend our garden with our meal guests I know that each person is getting a glimpse of how Jesus cares for them and their needs.
