Saturday afternoon before the rains began, Teri and I strolled in the yard to make sure we were on the same page about where beds were to be dug and prepared—Teri is interested in beauty, I am interested in food.  In my minds eye I can see where the asparagus bed will be, as well as the vineyard. Sunday afternoon, I spend an hour pondering varieties of asparagus and muscadine grapes and calling old phone numbers to order catalogues of all manner of seeds, trees and plants.

In the liturgical calendar, we are in the season of Epiphany. It is the time when we ponder the life and ministry of Jesus—what theologians call his “active obedience.”  This is the time we ponder Jesus with his hands in the mud healing a blind person, we see him at a wedding feast as the founder of the feast and the lord of the great dance.  We see him as flesh and blood, in our humanity in laughter, lament, tears and joy. The Christian year may start with Advent and the mystery of God made flesh, but it is in the season of Epiphany where we see Jesus live and move in space and time. Over the years, I have figured out that for me, Epiphany is a time of preparation.  Around Easter we will plant, but before that can take place—before we can even conceive of eating tomatoes in July—we must weed, work and condition the soil to receive the seed we will plant.

This winter has been unusually warm, but even if it hadn’t been, I can’t walk around the yard and help but see that springtime is not far away.  I don’t know if the ground hog will see his shadow or not, but the trees are budding, the winter rains are here and it won’t be long until the temperature begins to warm and the death of winter will once again be overcome by the rebirth of spring.

Once again, I am ready for the change that spring will bring.  It is amazing how every season brings with it no promise of anything that will be much different from last season, but somehow in the turn of seasons, God satisfies our need for change and each season offers a fresh promise of something new and exciting.

This year for me, it is the laying of the foundation of what I hope will be a harvest of good things for years to come.  I planted asparagus and a muscadine vineyard once before.  It takes three years after you plant an asparagus bed to get a crop. It is about the same with muscadines. I suppose the reason I plant these things is that they remind me that most good things do not happen in a moment; few things in life that offer instant gratification. Nor, for that matter,

are there many things that bring real and deep joy and pleasure that do not cost you a great deal in time, thought, effort and often money.

Gardening is a good and healthy rebuke of the cultural zeitgeist.  I have to garden to remind myself of the slow ways of God in almost all of life.  There are so many things in life that I have been at for a long time and still do not see the finished product.  Rearing children for instance; I still don’t know how this will turn out. For over twenty years I have been at it, and have quite a few to go to get an accurate appraisal of what has happened.

Church work is like this as well. If you need instant gratification, this is not the field to be in.  Church work is like gardening and farming.  It partakes in the same rhythms of preparation, planting, watering, weeding and harvesting. Nothing happens fast in a garden, nor does it in a church. Consider that we have been at it here at St. Patrick for seven year next month since we were organized as a church.  Seven years of ministry to this community, and it is just now that the reality of land and building are coming to fruition.  Seven years of being in a rented building, seven years of being like Aeneas, in the myth, who wandered for years before he founded Rome.

If you think about it, God views time differently than we do. God is not ever in a hurry. And we ought to really, really, really get a grasp of this perspective, for this reason—if God is not in a hurry and most of the results we hope to see don’t really happen fast—then we better start learning to enjoy the process.  The mundane!  All the things that go into making a crop, a family, a church, a business—we just don’t usually get to see instant results.  So if you don’t enjoy the mundane, the journey, the day in and day out—when will you ever find joy?  If you think about it, most of the fun of planting is the process—the joy of discovery, conversations with older gardeners, the delight of new tools, new ways to kill weeds, bugs and new varieties of plants, the smell and feel of freshly-tilled dirt, the miracle of seeing the first tiny fruit and the process of watching it ripen and take on texture, color and taste.

So, my iCal and Blackberry may orient me to what to do next on any given day or week, but they give me no perspective of real time, the seasons of time or the story that the time of year we are in is telling us.  No, you won’t get that on TV or the culture around you; you will have to get it from the church’s calendar of time, by taking a stroll in your yard or the woods and by engaging other image bears of God in long, slow conversation.  Calvin said, “The world is a theater of God’s glory.”  We all have a front row seat if we will take it.