Growing Gardeners

Earlier this evening, my Mom and I had a conversation in which the parable of the gardener came up. The conversation briefly explored the contrast between the gardener's responsibility to care for the plants and the plants' need to "bloom where they're planted." The moral lesson for us depends on which role we're playing.

Normally in the parable of the gardener, we are the plants and God is the Master Gardener who knows where and when to fertilize, water, and prune. Our role as plants in this analogy is to grow in the way the Gardener intends and to not chafe at His wise and needed corrections to the wrong choices we make as we grow. We are to "bloom where we're planted," doing the best we can with the situation God gives us.

However, we won't always be passive plants, totally subjected to and dependent on the will of the Gardener. The purpose of this whole existence is to help us become gardeners ourselves. As such, we are given frequent opportunities to practice "gardening," as parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, stewards, farmers, and literal gardeners. In these roles, we are to practice the virtues that the Master Gardener possesses, such as wisdom, compassion, tenderness, and sound judgment. As we learn and grow as gardeners, we can hope to eventually become Master Gardeners with gardens of our own, despite having once been merely part of someone else's garden.

Whether the lesson we need is patience or compassion, endurance or sound judgment, depends largely on where we are in the course of our growth. Once we have learned the wisdom of obedience, we can begin to learn the wisdom to pass sound judgment. We are all still plants and all of us are or will be gardeners. Thus, there are lessons for us on both sides of this relational analogy. As we spend time here in this garden, we must learn  both to be good plants and to become good gardeners.