It was a beautiful fall day in Wayne for the annual Hunt parade of horses, hounds and riders...and the Blessing of the Hounds at Little Home Church. Thank you to everyone who helped make this event such a welcoming moment in our 'front yard'. 

My wife loves her gardens, and I help as best as I can with often unintended results. Not knowing some flowers from some weeds, I pulled up - you guessed it - flowers. Now I know that if there's a bulb-y thing at the root, it's probably not a weed! At least now, I am not as often the direct cause of "issues" in the garden. I still "goof up" once in a while, but realize that other forces far beyond me are involved.

Over the years our Carol Stream garden has changed in response to its environment. A former neighbor, who was lax in draining his swimming pool into the nearby storm drain, often let the drain hose simply spill its chlorine laden contents onto his lawn. Our large oak tree and a beautiful tamarack lost a few branches on the side where their roots extended towards his lawn. As a result, many flowers and plants that enjoyed the oak's and tamarack's shade suffered, some died even after transplanting them to what shaded area we still had left. As for that shaded area, a few nice, cute shrubs are now small tree size and no longer fit the garden's intended design. Maybe we need to totally re-do the garden (and put in a soaker hose system while we're at it).

  

At Christa's other garden up at our Wisconsin cabin, the results were horrible! The culprit?...a beautiful walnut tree sitting right in the middle of the garden! Now any good gardener (not me for sure) knows that walnut trees give off a toxin through their roots to deter undergrowth. Something has to give: the tree that was there long before Christa's garden (or our cabin), or our mutual desire for a bountiful fruit and root crop garden. The end result: we got enough money from that tree's wood to buy lots of plants, some good-sized fruit trees and seeds.

Our church is one of God's many gardens. Our surrounding communities are the yards and lawns around us. The congregation is of course the hearty band of gardeners. As we look at the many possibilities that the New Beginnings process can give us for planting some new ideas, we must be mindful that not every idea or project that we plant will take root; but we need to try, to experiment, to see how fertile or open the surrounding community is to our efforts. And as for those things that already have deep roots in our church, we need to prayerfully discern which are capable of, not just simply surviving in our re-visioned spiritual garden, but more importantly, actively contributing to and defining its new purposes. Yes, I do miss the walnut tree even if the squirrels got to the nuts before me, but I just as much enjoy the apples, pears, peaches and cherries that we will harvest.