A Heart That Can Break

I lead a Bible study with some high school senior girls and this past week we met and walked through some verses from Nehemiah together.  I had gotten some of the questions from the Nehemiah study from Kelly Minter.  One of the questions we asked was what breaks your heart?  Each girl shared things that broke her heart and although we had a lot of the same things that our hearts hurt for, it was really cool to see that we also had different things on our lists too.  And those differences revealed so much of who each girl is and what her passions and callings in life are.

One of the things on my list was the mistreatment of land.  It's always been something that weighs on my heart and something that I'm passionate about helping.  I'm not sure if it was early exposure to the book The Lorax or watching Ferngully too many times or learning about the Tropical Rain Forest in 3rd grade, but either way my heart breaks for injustices done to the earth.  I recently watched this video about urban gardening and the cool thing that is going on in Philadelphia where an organization is partnering up with a lab and giving people free soil testing around the city to see if they can reclaim the land and safely grow a garden.     I was crying by the end of this video because it all seems so hopeless.  There is so much work to be done and it feels like very few people care about it.  As Christians, we should be leading the charge to restore our land.

I had stopped blogging because I just didn't think gardening mattered to a lot of people or to anyone.  Who cares if some girl in a small city in Indiana has a plot of land that she gardens?  But I was reminded that I can do my part to keep working toward a better future for the world; even if my garden plot isn't big.  I can advocate local food by eating my food and I can buy plants from my local Farmer's Market.  None of these things are revolutionary acts, but small deeds that just might get other people's attention.

Stay tuned summer is just beginning and there are so many fun adventures ahead.