Spring Things

Aren't 400 books enough?

What are your spring rituals? At our house we like to go through all of our stuff, a couple of rooms at a time, and bring carloads of what we don't need/haven't used to the Monroe Congregational Church's most excellent Outreach Tag Sale  for charity (ya'll come - it's this Saturday, March 17 from 9-12 at 34 Church Street, Monroe, CT). 

OK, maybe I am the only one that likes to do that. You see, I like organization, and secretly fear being a hoarder (my family seems to have the tendency). In fact, this year I encouraged my husband to pare down his book collection. If you know Clark, then you know what an emotional feat THAT was. "Think of all the people who would love to buy these! Think of all the space we will have freed up! We can actually see the floor in our bedroom to tear up that yucky carpet! I will let you keep 400 volumes - it's negotiable!" I cajoled. In the end, I got him to part with about 250 science fiction books he hadn't read for 20 years. And all the Redneck Humor books, which are just rubbish anyway. I gave up about 100, but I had far less at home anyway and a growing list on my Kindle, which is far more ecologically (and financially) viable.

Garden, year 3

Another spring ritual for us, at least for the past 4 years, has been the planning of our modest 12' x 12' vegetable garden. We've had growing success (see, I made a pun there!) with it, since our first year of putting a strawberry bed close to the forest line without a fence (an unmitigated disaster). Last year, we had some success with basil, tomatoes, green peppers and sugar snap peas.

We know that it is to early to plant, despite unseasonably warm temps, we still might get a frost some morning (we learned that with disastrous year two). But it's not to early to turn over the compost pile and weed the bed. Zack and I tackled this on Sunday, when Clark and Cady were at church. I am 9.5 weeks into a 12 week sabbatical, so my Sunday mornings are free for the moment.

As Zack and I were were turning over the soil, a thought struck me. A dear colleague in the CT Conference recently told me "parents are the ones that are primarily responsible for the faith formation of their children". Such a simple statement, and so very true. Even with the best intentioned Sunday school and youth program at a local church, parents are the people with the most access to build a child's faith. It's our responsibility as parents to offer them the chance to grow. Sometimes this faith building can be done during meals (grace), at bedtime (bible stories, evening prayers), action (serving at a soup kitchen as a family) or in conversations about how my daughter or son live in this world. 

Anyway, back to the garden. Zack and I talked about what good soil we had built, with layers of healthy compost, worms and other organic materials. He and I dreamed out loud of what we'd plant. We ran the soil through our hands, and talked about the water and sunlight that would make the seeds open their sleepy heads and sprout. "You know," I said, "Jesus told a parable, a teaching story, about a sower..." We took a couple of seeds out of a packet and spilled them on the driveway. "How would these grow?" Then we took some more and spilled them onto a shaded, rocky and shallow place in the garden/ "How about these?" Finally, we took a few and put them into the good soil. "What about these?" Each time, Zack would offer his opinion of what success we could expect. "And how are these different growing places like people?" 

Friends, if you are a parent (or you have a little one in your life that you are responsible for) remember that every day is a opportunity to open the world up to God's love. You may feel like you don't have the right "credentials" to talk about any of this stuff, but believe it or not you do. In fact, sometimes these lessons have come from my child, if I have the ears to hear.