Meditations From the Farmer’s Market
One of my favorite things about this summer has been our town’s farmer’s market. It’s become part of the rhythm of our week, as we seek to establish some routine in our new home and community. Sundays: church. Tuesdays: library class. Thursdays: Farmer’s Market.
Beginning to work in our gardens and buying local produce as it’s harvested is giving me a whole new perspective on time and seasons. It’s resetting my heart’s gears to a slower pace, causing me to acknowledge that growth requires gestation, that weeds are quick to grow and even faster to choke the life out of beauty, and that the harvest happens at an appointed time. Appointed, that is, not by me.
I am learning to quiet my heart. Yearning to keep in step with His timing, His seasons, rather than digging my heels in and insisting on dressing in bathing suits for a snowstorm or heavy rain gear for a starlit summer night.
The disciplines of thanksgiving and repentance (confession) are weeding out the contempt and bitterness and entitlement that so effortlessly shoot up like strangling vines around my heart.
And I find myself longing for more of His rhythm in my life. And not just in the slowly passing seasons, but in the minutia. I want to create spaces for our family to gather & soak in His Word.
I’m learning to let the ordinary, normally dreaded tasks of every day serve as catalysts to interact with the Holy, just as Jesus took on such ordinariness when He came down and dwelt among us.
I hope you have time to work in your garden today, weeding or harvesting, sowing or reaping, or maybe just waiting. To quiet your busy heart and encounter the One who makes all things new, all thing beautiful, in His time.
Update: I thought it was worth mentioning… If blogs had bibliographies (blogliographies?!) these would be on my list of inspiring things I’ve been reading & listening to this week that were steeping in my mind as I wrote this:
- Kathleen Norris’ Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women’s Work
- This post by Ann Voskamp
- Ron Walborn’s lecture (available on itunes, but I can’t figure out the link!) on the Gardening Concept of Spiritual Formation. I cannot recommend the series highly enough.
