What? You don’t Have One?

by John Comer

What venerable patriarch of Israel, Abraham, apparently didn’t bother much with gardens or crops? He was a man who kept herds. A nomad. As the seasons came and went, so did he. Last month’s rains determined next month’s grazing. He followed the green, green grass.

The only really productive land Abraham had available to use (lush and tropical, actually), he gave up to his nephew Lot, which, in the long term, worked out to the serious detriment of his nephew. (Maybe this shows that even when the grass is truly greener on the other side of the fence, it’s not always wise to go after it.)

Abraham did seem to appreciate a nice grove of shade trees. He often pitched his tent near the great trees of Mamre, at Hebron. And he did plant a tamarisk tree. But that’s a story all in itself, so we’ll save it for another time.

I grew up in rural south Arkansas, at a time when everybody who was anybody raised a garden, and every respectable house had flowers in the yard. The ultimate put-down to suggest that a family was shiftless, was to say, “They don’t even raise a garden.” That was about as low as you could get. Even Father Abraham seems suspect by those standards that early became part of my being.

Through the years I’ve been able to make some attitude adjustments. Yes, I now believe that God loves even people who don’t enjoy gardening. You can get to heaven even if you’ve never planted a squash or tomato. If there are no petunias growing in your yard, that does not make you less of a person. God shows no favoritism. If he can accept you as a non-gardener, so can I.

All of the above leads to this probing question: Can some of my other long-held assumptions on topics much more vital than those of cucumbers and sunflowers be flawed also? Using the traditional wisdom of my own background as the standard of measurement in theology, can I say we must all be as alike as peas in a pod? All like me? Who am I to judge someone else’s servant (Romans 14:4)? When God makes his great harvest, I suspect his grace will appreciate a certain diversity.