Growing plants and meeting people

 Last July, I turned up at a community gardening volunteer session with my three children in tow. I'd been told about the sessions by a Muslim friend. The local council has a small site filled to the brim with a couple of polytunnels and raised beds and containers as well as a little market garden down the road. They invite members of the public to volunteer, helping to grow fruit and vegetables, and donate the produce to a local foodbank. I was intrigued as I'd long wanted to get involved in food growing. Not only that, but the site was close to our church. I wondered if this would give me a chance to get to know non-Christians and offer opportunities to share the Gospel.

Fast forward nearly a year, and we are still turning up one morning a week. I help with a variety of tasks such as planting out seedlings, weeding, re-creating 'no dig' beds and harvesting, depending on the time of year. We home educate our three boys (aged 7, 5 and 3) so they come along with me and get as involved as they want to - sometimes they are eager to get involved with tasks (trundling empty wheelbarrows back to compost bins and soil sieving are favourites) and other times they prefer to play by themselves. Looking back at the last year, the community gardening has been one of the most worthwhile activities that we've got involved in.

It is helpful in several different ways for us to get our hands in the earth and to work hard together at something physical. We are formed from the dust of the ground and it does us good to get out into the fresh air and remember that our daily bread is literally coming from crops growing up out of the muddy ground. We've learned about patience waiting for seeds to sprout. We definitely learned something about resilience when we planted out onions in the pouring rain. Watching kale continue to grow through the frosty winter, scrabbling around in the earth harvesting potatoes and marvelling at the most enormous parsnip showed us God's goodness and led us to worship. Isn't it amazing that the tiny seeds we plant grow up into large plants that we can harvest and eat? Watching plants grow still feels a little bit magic to me. Then, depending on the plant, we might be harvesting the root, the tuber, the stem, the fruit, the flower or the leaves! In amongst the goodness, there have been other truths to see in the garden too. When the entire pumpkin patch fell victim to an early frost, when the slugs gorged themselves on the lettuces, when the carrots were suffocated by weeds we tasted the bitterness of fallen creation.

More importantly, it has been a fantastic way to get to know local people who, I think it is fair to say, are very unlikely to have just turned up at church or come along to a church event. The number of volunteers at each session varies and there is often significant turnover but gradually I've been able to get to know some of the people who, like us, turn up most weeks. One recent history graduate shared her story of growing up Hindu and then embracing Zen Buddhism with me over a vegetable bed. As we talked about how we practised our different faiths, I was able to share with her about Christmas and why it matters for Christians. Chatting while working together on a job gives surprising opportunities for listening to people and learning about them, as well as sharing appropriately ourselves. My other realisation has been just how many people are lonely and need to work. The natural demographic for a weekday volunteering session is those out of regular paid work - whether those looking for work, unable to work, retired or not in paid work for some other reason. We know that we were made to work and some people seem to have come along for something to do and someone to do it with. Jesus' ministry focused on the poor and needy and it is great to be able to get to know some of these people in a context where we are working with dignity alongside each other as equals to help others. An older gentleman who came along for a while gave my boys a telescope. He told me that he had been saving the telescope to pass down to his own children and he had realised he had passed the age of having children. He told me that my children were the only children he knew and so he wanted to gift the telescope to them.

This is not to say it's been easy. I urgently called my boys out of the way when an argument between two volunteers looked like it was going to come to blows. While my children are usually the only children there, one of the volunteers occasionally brings her similarly aged son in the school holidays. She has a female partner and I wonder when and how I tell my children that their new friend is probably going to talk about his two mums at some point. One gentleman who comes has occasionally been slightly (and understandably) frustrated at the children sometimes getting in the way. The man who gave us the telescope also shared conspiracy theories with my seven year old. Sometimes the boys are bored and want to go home and sometimes I want to go home as well. And then I think what a privilege it is that we get to meet people from all walks of life and we see God's common grace and the brokenness of sin in each and every person.

When we moved to our town, I desperately wanted to put roots down in the local community, to teach my children about how to plant seeds and trust God to send rain on the righteous and the unrighteous, and to get to know non-Christians. Volunteering in our community garden is enabling me to do exactly that.