The garden is full of so many wonderful metaphors applicable to life. And death.
On Good Friday we began to turn the compost pile. It took a couple days because we hadn't done it in a while. It looked like such a towering rat's nest! I finished pulling out the lovely black stuff at the bottom Saturday morning, tossed the rest of the decomposing material back in the bin and closed it up again. It was really hard work. Heavy lifting, shifting, carrying the compost to its new home and digging it in. I was sweating. Sweating and thinking.
It is so rewarding to harvest your own compost! All that delightful black soil that I am feeding my garden with this year, was our kitchen garbage last year! I find myself hoarding scraps in the kitchen to add to the pile because I love the freeing process, I love the end product, so much. Linus does his part too. He sniffs around the bottom of the box and finds any tidbits that may still be tasty and takes his teeth to them. Then we toss them back in! Last year our compost pile grew two heavy-yielding tomato plants - pro bono! The compost bin gives back, abundantly.
The more you turn the compost, the better the decomposition, and the more harvesting you can do. My goal this year is to turn the compost once a month. That doesn't sound like much, but we turned it once last year and we got a good six inches (maybe eight!) by four feet squared of compost this Spring. In my life, the more I turn the better I get too.
I've been feeling bad about how often I have to apologize to Luke for losing my patience with him. I lose my cool, I shout, I get angry, I send him to his room in tears, and then I make myself turn and apologize. It's become a pattern. A pattern I have been ashamed of. Then one day a few weeks ago I got impatient with Luke climbing all around inside the car while I was waiting to buckle him in. Luke lost it first, and screamed at me. I had a few choice words to say, but I held my tongue and before I could get angrier I got into the driver's seat, and took a few deep breaths. Shortly, I heard a sniffle and a quiet, "Mom?" from the backseat. "I'm sorry I screamed at you," Luke murmured. I was so surprised I could barely choke out, "I forgive you". My three-year-old has never apologized under his own steam. Not until this moment, anyway. It made me pause, and I realized that all of these times when I've been so ashamed of losing my temper, I did something right. I apologized. And my son's heartfelt apology is proof that we can learn from somebody else's mistakes. I have to keep turning. There's more to harvest.
The great thing about compost is that dead doesn't mean gone, or useless, or even sad. After you finish that delicious, juicy cantaloupe, you put the rind and seeds in the compost bin and a few weeks or months later you find the most healthy, warm, black soil in the entire world, just waiting for you to plant something new in it. Yes, perhaps you wish you could eat it again, if it was that delicious. But the memory is savory enough to last a long time. Or perhaps it was moldy before you got to it and nothing good came of it in life, but in the compost bin it can find a new cause! You might even get a surprise and find that one of the seeds has fallen just outside the bin and sprouted all on its own, volunteering a new, fruitful vine!
Three days after we had a wonderful Easter dinner with Derek's grandparents, celebrating Jesus's resurrection, Derek's grandma died. We enjoyed her company Sunday, alive, smiling, talking, eating. We talked to her Tuesday, while she lay unconscious and nearing death. We saw her Wednesday, an hour after she breathed her last breath. We saw her Thursday, dead, and in a coffin. Sunday we buried her. We enjoyed knowing Grandma, Great-grandma to our sons. We sometimes regret that we didn't know her better. Like me, she enjoyed gardening, and I think she would appreciate being compared to my compost. I am sure Grandma turned plenty in her life: apologizing, repenting, forgiving, loving. I didn't know her that long, only ten years out of nearly eighty-five. And the last few of those years her dementia really got in the way of our relating to one another. But I know she loved Jesus, I know she prayed, and I know she loved people and did her best to love them like Jesus does. She did a lot of turning, had a really good life, and death is the last turn before the harvest. We literally get to be dug into the ground after we die, left to decompose in the earth for Jesus himself to harvest when he returns to make a new creation! How lovely is that metaphor!? We will have new life - no! We will BE new life, made from the old, made from the turning and turning and turning and turning.
This I believe. Praise Jesus!
