Unlike so many horticulture experts or at least serious gardeners, I am completely in the dark about flowers, plants, trees. While they are nice enough to look at, I find it laborious to track the intricacies of how one shrub needs this amount of water and sun and another shrub needs that amount, or even that some species of fallen leaves when left on your lawn too long can harm it. I am learning that not all plant material is created equally. Some are more fragile or sturdier than others, not to mention that soil conditions play a critical role in their potential flourishing. I have a newfound appreciation for the simplicity, complications, and nuances that go into stewarding plants and their ecosystems well.

But as you probably know better than me, environmental conditions have limits. The sun, moon, and stars can be aligned in your favor with the ideal amount of fertilizer, and sunshine, with critters and insects cooperating, and your lilac, tulips, lavender, peonies, or roses still may not grow. Or they could blossom too soon or stay around too long. Meanwhile, some goofy bush on your property that you’ve never been fond of might be doing wonderfully. Furthermore, just because something is planted in good soil doesn’t necessitate that it will grow when and how we want it to, as there are a litany of seen and unseen factors at-play, some that can be controlled or influenced, but a lot that can, in the end, only be accepted.

In Steve Cuss’ latest book The Expectation Gap: The Tiny, Vast Space Between Our Beliefs and Experience of God, he argues, in part, that the privileged Western tint to our faith formation can at times cause a faulty overemphasis on self-help among Christians, in that we become so preoccupied with improving, advancing, and updating our individualized spiritual operating systems, perhaps with good intentions, that we lose sight of truly worshiping the one, true Master Gardener and his awe-inspiring will, work, and ways. Although, as with anything, there needs to be balance to that argument, I think he is onto something.

In our culture, it comes naturally to treat sanctification as a short-term, quick fix encounter. We can approach discipleship like how we would go about purchasing something on QVC or Amazon, or at Kohl’s or Menards. After browsing around, I order what I want or need, check out, pay for everything, and that is it. I then go home feeling enhanced or upgraded, and happy. However, that is not how life with God works. It is not a series of transactional exchanges. It is a covenant relationship, where we have a manner of real agency and authority, but where we—most importantly—are dependent on Him for everything. Of course, that relationship is never messy because of anything God ever does, but, oh, it does get messy!

Yet, I am reminded of Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:26-30.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

Doing matters…a lot. It always has and always will. Remember James 2:14-26? But we must guard ourselves, and help one another, from making it an idol. As the school year ends and we enjoy the welcomed presence of consistently warm weather, I pray we will appreciate the sacredness of the eternal soil we have been planted in—or that has been planted in us—which requires our response, by grace through faith, but whose feats are never fully dictated by our actions.