Bloom where you’ve been planted
Joy French
Several years ago, my husband and I were leading a Messy Church in a school on the Wybourn estate. It was something that we absolutely loved – many families were regularly attending each fortnight, and almost all of them had no other connection with a church. It was a time of immense learning for us, and a time when we regularly saw God working in people’s lives.
One day, we decided to prayer-walk the estate. Our youngest son was still in a buggy, and it was a beautiful summer’s day. We had almost reached the end of our walk, and as we rounded a corner, we saw a garden which made me gasp!
It was filled with the most incredible poppies. They were of almost every colour, with flower heads as big as dinner plates, and there were hundreds of them. In the middle of the garden, stood a toothless older man, appreciating the beauty of his gardening skills!
I couldn’t help myself, and in the moment, I blurted out “Your garden is so beautiful!” The old gentleman came over to me, snapped the seed-head off one of his poppies, and handed it to me across the garden fence. “You see that seed?” he said, “Inside this is the seed for thousands of flowers – if you plant it, you can have thousands of flowers too.”
As I walked away with the gift of my precious seed-head, I couldn’t help but think that the moment felt heavy with prophetic imagery: The seed had come from the community we were journeying with, the promise was there that the seed would do what it is made to do – bloom and create new life! We were longing to see exactly the same.
I told this story at church when I was preaching several weeks ago, and two days later, I received the invitation to write this article, reflecting on the verse in John’s gospel that says “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” (John 12:24)
I’m conscious that at the moment, so many of us are feeling overwhelmed. Life has been hard for the last few years, Covid has pushed services such as health and education, that were already close to breaking point, into uncharted territories.
When I look around church on a Sunday, I see the faces of faithful people who are serving God wholeheartedly, but who are also tired and asking new questions about life, faith and the church. It feels as though everything familiar has been shaken and many of us are longing for some breathing space.
As I prayed about this verse, I had an overwhelming image of people in darkness, trying to breathe, feeling suffocated and as though there was no way out. It was quite a scary image. I heard the words, “You might feel like you have been buried, but really, you have been planted.”
This is a challenging time for us all. When the things that have been familiar to us and that we have put our security in are shaken, we can feel overwhelmed, as though we can’t breathe. But the God of history – the God who has seen all of human life for all of time - is not shaken.
The pattern of the Kingdom of God is not a pursuit of comfort and stability, but rather, a rhythm of death and resurrection. A seed going into the ground looks like death – there is darkness, decay, an emptying and silence…we hold our breath and hope… and then there is growth, new life, flourishing and beauty. These truths of God are woven deep into the fabric of our natural world.
Jesus does not promise us an easy life (in fact, he actively promises us “trouble”), but he also reminds us to “take heart, I have overcome the world!” (John 16.33).
In this time of trouble, I am offering you the encouragement to “bloom where you’re planted.” It may be that you feel buried right now, but there is the promise of new life ahead. God is like my toothless Wybourn gardener, always tending proudly to his seedlings.
It is not our responsibility to make everything grow, but we do get to be a part of the garden. I wonder what blooming looks like for you right now? I know that right across Sheffield, the master gardener is busy planting seeds and watching them burst into flower. Even in the darkness and uncertainty of being planted, we know that new life is on its way.