GREETINGS TO THE HOLY PEOPLE OF GOD,
The celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Community Garden is coming soon - Sunday, the 2nd of October. I hope you will come and celebrate this milestone. Ten years ago, a couple of people thought it would be a good idea to host a community garden. As I went around our neighborhood with VBS fliers that summer, I noticed many tomato plants on patios and agreed that this would be a good idea and a wonderful welcome to our neighbors. King Park is a little oasis in our neighborhood with a garden that invites those with green thumbs to grow vegetables, flowers, and relationships.
God has richly blessed us and our gardeners with good healthy food. Relationships have formed and gardening methods shared from around the world. New foods discovered from different lands and of course a good fence to keep rabbits and deer from feasting on the buffet of garden delights. Many conversations about weed management, mulch, water and the closing of the season for the garden were navigated.
I remember the requests for a water pipe to be run down to the garden. Talking it over with Mission and Justice and Property Committees and Council. I confess that I was reluctant to have us invest in something I wasn’t sure was going to be around and of course all the worst-case scenarios ran through my mind with an open pipeline to water. And now 10 years have passed, and the garden has grown and so have we with God’s nurturing presence. Gardeners are the creative sort, and the solution was to run a hose from the church down to the garden so that plastic tanks could be filled, and gardeners could draw water from the tanks. We have added tanks over the years and have recruited people to fill them throughout the week.
I give thanks to God for these ten years and all the ways God has helped us to share this garden with our neighbors and each other. God has blessed us through this garden and the many hands that help to make it possible. God does some of his best work in gardens and with us. To God be the glory!
Bold Inquisitive Belief Loving Expansively,
Pastor Connie Spitzack
