Treasures from the Garden

For the last two weeks, my parents played hooky, celebrating their wedding anniversary on Kauai, Maui, Hawai’i, and Oahu. While they were gone I got to taste honest-to-goodness real adult life. Not the college apartment, college roommates, college classes, and college part-time job and associated struggles adult life but the juggling 3 kids in school, seminary, music lessons, can’t-eat-fast-food-every-night. Shake that up with pets, a house to keep up with, a job, and grocery shopping for 4, and you learn quickly that being a “real adult” is a little more complicated than it seems in that condo on University Ave.

One of my responsibilities while Mom and Dad were gone was to pick the vegetables in the garden when they were ripe. This season, the garden has needed check almost every day. And as I have spent a little time getting dirty in the garden, I’ve learned a few things.

This year has been good to our garden indeed. One day I picked 6 six summer squash, enough green beans for dinner twice, and a head of Romaine lettuce. Then next day I picked 8 patty pan squash and a few poblano peppers, which were not close to ready the day before. In fact, I have been gratefully giving a lot of the harvest away to friends as neighbors because we simply can’t go through it fast enough. I know our garden’s success is not due to my green thumbs, and I really haven’t put that much work into the garden, so that can’t be the answer either. However, almost every time I work in the garden, I have had the distinct impression that “the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare” (Doctrine and Covenants 104:17, italics added). As I have shared squash and green beans and cucumbers, I have felt again that the Malthusian catastrophe is fiction. The earth can keep up with man so long as we use our bridle excessive consumption, use our resources wisely, and share our bounty generously.

Over the days, the impression of “enough and to spare” began to refer not only to the garden, but to me also. One of my great fears, which I sure most of us feel at some point, has been that I won’t have enough love or faith or courage or strength or time to do all that I am supposed to do. This week, however, Father in Heaven has gently reminded me that I do have enough, and to spare. He has given me specific responsibilities in this life and he did not put me here to fail. Maybe my soil is full of clay and perhaps I will have to stretch my leaves toward the sun and my roots toward water, but those are just opportunities to grow a little stronger, a little taller, a little more firmly grounded.

So thanks to you, Dad, for growing a garden every year that I can remember. If your gardens never produce another tomato or squash or green bean, know that they were worth all your hard work. And thanks to you, mom for always helping with the garden, falling in love with Hawai’i, teaching Dad to love it, and taking him again this year so that I could work and learn in our little garden patch. And thanks to Father in Heaven, for giving us giving the opportunity to grow gardens, and teaching me about me through green beans and squash.