I'm home.

For a whole month, every episode I sent you was recorded before I left — and every one ended with the same small promise: when I'm back, I'll bring you the full report. This is the report. After twenty-one years and an ocean, I stood again in the garden that made me, in a small town in western Romania. And I came home with more than fit in a suitcase.

The first thing that undid me was the market. Tables of fruit and vegetables still warm from the field — tomatoes so red they looked lit from inside. And everything tasted better. One bite and my whole body remembered: that's what a tomato is supposed to taste like. It wasn't only nostalgia. It was closeness. And I stood there thinking — isn't that just like God? The nearer I get to the Source, the more everything tastes the way it was meant to.

Then I went to the actual house. I didn't need a map; my body knew every street. Another family lives there now, but under the terrace — protected from thirty-five years of weather — the chalk drawings my sisters and I made as girls were still there. Kept, like little cave paintings, waiting for me to come back and find them.

Then I came home to Texas — to a garden gone feral. Spent tomatoes I pulled; a few I cut down to a stub, and they're already budding back. The moment I cleared them, my crowded peppers came alive. And on my knees in the heat, it came together: what I saw across the ocean and what I saw in my own dirt were the same lesson.

The same God tends every garden

"While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest… shall not cease" (Genesis 8:22). That promise wasn't made to a country. It was made to the earth. The God who fed me as a child in Romanian soil is not a smaller God now that I've moved on. He crossed every border with me. You did not leave Him behind when you left.

You cannot go where His hand is not

"If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast" (Psalm 139:9–10). Every transplant goes through shock — it wilts, it looks like it might not make it. But a good gardener doesn't leave; she holds the root steady through the part that feels most like dying. That is what God did with you through every move of your life. You wilted. You rooted. You're here.

He set the borders on purpose

"He marked out… the boundaries of their lands, so that they would seek him and find him — though he is not far from any one of us" (Acts 17:26–27). Every border you've crossed was arranged to send you reaching. And in the reaching you find what was true the whole time: He was never far.

My wild garden preached the last of it back to me: it grew while I was gone. The keeping of your life was never held by your constant grip — it rests on His. One plants, another waters, but God gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6–7).

This week, try three things: (1) Find the same soil — name one thing God is doing now the way He did it in a season you've left. (2) Carry a seed home — plant one good thing from where you've been into where you are. (3) Tend the wild that grew while you were away — pull what's spent, cut back what needs it, and watch for what comes alive.

A breath prayer to carry: If I settle on the far side of the sea… even there, Your hand holds me.

He is not far from you. He never was.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Rooted in Grace: Intuitive Gardening for Christian Women →

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