🎧 Listen to Episode 109 of Rooted in Grace: Intuitive Gardening for Christian Women →

I've spent this last week on my knees in the dirt, in the thick of a Texas July, resetting a garden that got completely away from me while I was gone.

If you were with me last week, you know I came home from a month in Romania to a jungle. The squash had climbed the fence and spilled over the beds and filled up the walking paths until there was hardly anywhere to step. Tomatoes dried up and spent. The whole thing a beautiful, feral tangle. And my mom — still here with me from the trip — rolled up her sleeves, and the two of us reset the entire garden together.

We pruned it back hard. It was painful. A little heartbreaking, honestly, to cut back that much and pull that much out. But it was also — and I didn't expect this word — cathartic. There is something so good about clearing out the finished, wasted, overgrown things. By the end my arms were full of everything that hadn't made it, and my heart was strangely lighter.

I did grieve the tomatoes. They didn't last, and I stood there quietly counting what I'd lost. Maybe you know that ledger. Maybe you poured a whole season into something — a project, a home, a stretch of caregiving, a ministry — and you didn't get to enjoy the fruit of it the way you pictured. Somebody else did. Or nobody seemed to. And some part of you keeps a quiet tally: I worked so hard, and I didn't even get to hold what came of it.

That's the ache I brought to the garden this week. And the garden taught me three things about abundance I did not expect.

First: you tend, but God grows.

Right before I left for Romania, a friend handed me okra seeds, and I did the laziest possible thing — I threw them in the ground on my way out the door and left the country. I came home to okra trees. Huge, gorgeous, burgundy-spined, already fruiting and still tender. The seeds I abandoned became the healthiest thing in my whole garden, while the tomatoes I babied gave out. If the harvest ran on my effort, that math would be exactly backwards. "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth… only God who gives the growth" (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). I have gardened for years and I still cannot make one seed swell. God gave the growth over my garden the entire month I wasn't even in the country. The keeping of your life does not rest on your relentless supervision. It rests on the One who gives the growth.

Second: stewarding well means knowing what to water — and what to leave to God.

In the Romanian countryside I met a woman who has almost nothing, and I have not stopped thinking about her. She knew exactly which plants to water with her own two hands and which to leave to God for the watering. That's not laziness — that's the wisdom most of us are worst at. We believe faithfulness means watering everything, gripping everything, being responsible for every outcome — and we burn ourselves dry trying to be the rain for a whole garden God never asked us to water alone. Even in Psalm 65 it is God who "waters the earth abundantly." Your job is to water what's actually in your hands and your season, and honestly entrust the rest.

Third: the abundance was never only for you.

Here's the one that healed me. While I was gone, friends came and picked from my garden at will. My first instinct was to file that under loss — until I remembered that's the whole point. "He who supplies seed to the sower… will supply and multiply your seed for sowing… You will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way" (2 Corinthians 9:10–11). The harvest was never a private stockpile. It's seed meant to feed a table wider than your own. That woman with almost nothing heaped summer squash into my arms because she understood a garden's yield is meant to leave the gardener's hands. My friends eating from my garden while I was away wasn't abundance wasted. It was abundance doing exactly what abundance is for.

So here's the whole thing, tied together: you tended, and God grew it. You watered your part and entrusted the rest. And the abundance that came — even the part you never got to taste — went out and fed somebody. That is not a season that came up short. That is a season that did exactly what God designed it to do.

This week, try three things

1. Do the honest reset — and don't do it alone. Name one overgrown, spent thing that needs a hard cutting-back, and ask someone to sit in the cathartic work with you.

2. Water your part; entrust the rest. Name one thing you've been trying to water that was never yours to water, and say it plainly: "This one I leave to You."

3. Give some of the harvest away on purpose — fill someone's arms out of whatever you've got, even the little, and watch your grief turn to gratitude.

A breath prayer to carry: I plant, and I water — but You give the growth.

There is enough, friend. There is even enough to share.

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