Look! I’m doing a new thing;
    now it sprouts up; don’t you recognize it?
I’m making a way in the desert,
    paths in the wilderness. – Isaiah 43:19

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! – 2 Corinthians 5:17

Heading over to Wake Forest and back, sometimes a couple of times a week, always with the focus on packing, Rebekah and I are finding it close to impossible to keep up with the garden.

Fortunately, we adopted a “low maintenance” format several years ago and, generally, I am able to knock things back into shape every so often without investing too many hours of work.

So I was in the garden this past week and it occurred to me how completely different everything was when we first arrived in North Carolina – on that same mid-August date – eleven years ago. And also that it has not been so much garden maintenance as it has been garden vision, garden reimagining, garden facilitation, garden nurture and garden redevelopment….

We have enjoyed the ongoing “process” that is growth and redirection and planting trees and sowing seeds and hard work and occasional failure and drought and storm damage and renewal and replanting and so much more.

And, looking at it this past week, it is so obvious to me that – even had we wanted to – there is no possible way that our garden could ever look like it did eleven years ago.

Why? Because the garden is alive. The trees have grown and the shade has changed and the deer have traipsed through and the climate is shifting and the birds have redistributed the seeds and the soil has mulched and leeched and more and the grass has mostly gone away and the pine straw and the leaves have continued to fall…..

There is only one direction that life moves, and that is forward. And there is only one way for things to stand still and remain unchanged – they have to be dead. Dead and mummified.

There is only one way for things to remain unchanged – they have to be dead and mummified…

Then I thought about church

So as I mowed and weeded and raked and picked up branches I thought about the church (The Church, writ large). I thought about how congregations evolve and change and grow and occasionally stagnate and at times there is new planting and then weeding and always change because change is life, but never staying the same unless it is dead and mummified but what use is a mummified church?

What would the point be of ever moving backwards? The trees have already grown and the canopy has filled in and the light has shifted, and babies are baptized and new people arrive but then some have died or gone off to college or just moved, and then there are these other good folk who we never knew before. And they bloom so beautifully.

Jesus Christ may be, as Hebrews 13 declares, “the same yesterday and today and forever,” but I live, and worship, and follow Jesus in a garden; we all do.

Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. – Hebrews 13:7-8