Welcome to My People Garden

Think for a moment. Consider the various acts of sowing seeds you do each and every day. Perhaps you smile at someone on the elevator, you pay a nice tip to the waiter at the restaurant. Maybe your acts of sowing seeds go deeper like making lunch for your children, doing the laundry for your spouse, or washing the car? Sowing seeds is not difficult. We do it all the time and probably do not even recognize the act. Have you ever received an act of sowing a seed? You probably have and didn’t recognize as such because it was labeled as “paying it forward.” I believe that we should sow seeds more selflessly the more we care about someone. By that I mean that we may be guarded and sow simple smile seeds or gestures of kindness with strangers, but for the ones we really care about, we sow seeds more diligently, with purpose. Believe it or not, it is easy to sow seeds when we sow them from the heart.

Maybe, just maybe, sowing seeds from the heart is easier for strangers because we are not carrying around rocks that get in the way of pure, genuine love for someone else. If this be the case, then are our rocks getting in the way of sowing seeds for those nearest us?

Admittedly, it is easier to sow seeds to strangers because we often do not see any strings attached to such an act, and we “feel good” when we sow those sorts of seeds. One of the most encouraging turning points for me was the day when someone planted a seed with me about serving. I was in college at the time, and one of our classes required a service project. As I mentioned earlier, I was literally in the depth of heartbreak, and God stretched me out to serve someone else. My first instinct was that honestly, I didn’t have the energy or will to serve someone else in me. Serving someone else now was the reverse of what I thought I needed.

Someone needed to serve me, after all! I had been wronged in life. My life was turned upside down. That was not God’s plan for me. Or so I thought.

Strangers—make that homeless strangers—were the sowers of seeds to me in this most difficult time. In a very vulnerable place in my life, homeless strangers showed me that even when they had lost everything in their lives, they never lost God and their faith in Jesus. Better yet, they showed me that I was worthy even at my worst. I recall one gentleman named Joe. His story was quite fascinating. He told me during our conversation that his job was that of public speaker. I asked, “Really? How so?” He said he had been a prisoner at one time and he had a conversation with his mother when he got out of the penitentiary. She asked him who was important in his life.

He said, “You, Momma.”

She said, “No, Joe, who is important in your life?”

He told me that he didn’t have a good answer for her at the time, but when she passed away, then he knew. Jesus was important to him. Then he explained that his mission now is about telling others he knows about who is important in his life.

He is blessed with an endless supply of backpacks with a Bible in it from a generous provider, someone who people gardens with him. He goes to a homeless day center that provides backpacks and Bibles, and inevitably, someone steals his backpack with his stuff in it. As would happen, at this event we were both attending, his backpack was stolen. The weird thing is that I said good-bye to him and walked inside to the house where the host of the event was to say good-bye, and by the time I came back out, a whole sixty seconds later, he was gone! Vanished! I was going to say good-bye again.

My service event was not complete, so our team went back for the second phase where we had collected peanut butter and grape jelly for the host so they are stocked to make sandwiches for the homeless on regular days. Lo and behold, Joe was there. It was the greatest joy to see his face, and out of all the people he probably sees all the time, he remembered my face! It brought such joy to see him again and give him a hug. He advised that he had indeed been given a new backpack with a Bible after our first meeting. His outlook on that subject is that God knew that someone else needed those items more than him. Funny thing, though—he said he knew I was going to be there, he felt it in his heart and he made sure he brought a buddy of his with him.

I had brought my older sons with me on this occasion as they needed some volunteer hours for high school. Joe’s friend, Fred, goes by the job of entertainer. This man has an uncanny gift for drawing. He loves to use a blue ballpoint pen to draw portraits of people. As he is doing it, though, he does this swirling around, and the cool thing about the blue ink is that it will smear. He uses the ink smears for depth in the portrait, like shading. I thought, Wow, what an amazing gift to show the beauty in someone as shown by someone who is homeless—someone society tends to frown upon when here is this group of people who are so gifted, yet so misunderstood. People gardeners are the best when I find them in my journeys.

On the other hand, I have found over time that the seeds of strength, encouragement, and sacrifice that Mark sowed in me were the most selfless seeds he could ever sow. The difficult part about that is that when he sowed those seeds, they hurt. Those seeds cut through my heart, and I thought he was the worst kind of weed in my life, sowing the worst sorts of seeds. The seeds of destruction ripped my heart in pieces and brought me to such a low that I was not sure if I could ever find light again. Had he not worked so hard to wake me up and find my inner strength and grow my faith in God, I would not have been able to work through my backyard and clean out all the rocks the way I did. It took a lot of perseverance and patience in myself. I had to learn how to sow better seeds in my own heart and to work through all those rocks stored there—the rocks that I didn’t want to admit that I held onto. I learned that I could not ignore the wait-a-minute vines keeping my heart in tangles.