For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land of flowing streams and pools of water, with fountains and springs that gush out in the valleys and hills. It is a land of wheat and barley; of grapevines, fig trees, and pomegranates; of olive oil and honey. – Deuteronomy 8:7-8

Today is the official big 150th Anniversary Celebration at our church, Howard Memorial Presbyterian here in Tarboro.

If you’re within 100 miles, come! If not, go to church somewhere. This is a celebration of the Good News, and it’s a message that this world needs now more than ever. It’s just that, here in Tarboro, we’re extra excited about it all today!

More on this probably Monday. But this morning I want to share a garden parable. Because Saturday, for the first time since we moved here at the end of 2023, Rebekah and I (mostly Rebekah) did a little Tarboro gardening.

It’s this next stage of moving here. With the summer gone and the fall now well under way, this is the time to relocate any plants we want to bring with us. But we can’t put them in our Saint Patrick Street garden yet, because it is still a construction site and there is no telling what would happen.

So we prepared a trench at the rental house, a garden patch designed to be a kind of temporary lodging situation for the plants we dug up Friday over in Wake Forest.

Getting down on our knees there in the dirt, making sure the plants are secure and well nourished, reminded me a little of this interim pastor situation Rebekah now finds herself in.

Her job, as we understand it, is a lot like what is happening to the plants that are transitioning from Wake Forest to Tarboro. It’s about spending time on our knees, it’s about nurturing, it’s about making sure everyone is secure and well nourished. It’s about preparation for growth, it’s about encouragement. It’s about preparing the ground.

Good Ground:

And this sure is good ground here with the saints in Tarboro. Our church is very much fertile ground. Howard Memorial is so ready for what is next.

Meanwhile, Rebekah and I are cultivating uncertain ground over at 408 Saint Patrick Street. The soil is rough and full with debris and hasn’t had hardly a living blade of grass in a decade or more. It’s the part of the story I haven’t talked – or written – much about as yet, but it’s a story laden with promise and possibility and hope.

And we are taking steps. There, in a trench alongside the fence in the back of our rental on Saint James, is the beginnings of something that will be beautiful and full with life.

The biblical narrative, the long arc of the story of God’s patient and far reaching love, begins in a garden, comes to its climax in a garden, and finishes – with a glimpse into eternity – in a garden watered by the river of life.

And, so long as my back holds up, our story will too – DEREK