Down to earth Christianity: Getting our hands dirty

A BIT OF EARTH:
A year in the garden with God
By Andrea G. Burke
Lexham Press. 258 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978 1 683 597 421

I guess that part of our affinity with gardening is due to where we all come from. Human beings were first created from the stuff of the soil; we are all a combination of dust and glory. Adam the first man was a gardener, and we have been cultivating the earth ever since.

My wife and I have had an allotment for the last decade. It is good exercise and ensures a steady supply of fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the year. Summer raspberries, courgettes and beans; potatoes, leeks and Swiss chard for most of the year, and Brussels sprouts and parsnips for Christmas Day.

Jesus used lots of horticultural images in His teaching; we can learn a lot of spiritual lessons by considering the flowers of the field and the persistence of weeds!

Agricultural images of the field can be found throughout Scripture. Preachers like the Puritan John Flavel preached sermons on the spiritual lessons of horticulture, as did Spurgeon. I guess there is something genuinely down to earth about reflecting on lessons from the soil.

This book is a delightful blend of the author’s musings on the rotation of winter, spring, summer and autumn. The book is a combination of a journal of the day-to-day experiences of gardening with helpful reflections on what it means to garden with God by meditating on the spiritual lessons attached to working the soil.

Particularly poignant are the reflections on waiting and weeds. It is helpful to be reminded that for all our hard work the secret of growing comes from waiting on God and wrestling with those persistent weeds and pesky predators that threaten the harvest.

Speaking about trying hard to pull out the whole root of a weed, the author concludes: ‘The same diligence can be applied in our daily lives. Where we cannot uproot something entirely, let’s not grow apathetic toward its existence. Remove its life. Suffocate it, and let the Master Gardener do the final work. He who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it (Phil.1:6).’