When you grow up on the farm, you learn to feel almost a reverence for the soil. From the ground new life springs and food grows.
I am too young to remember the "Dust Bowl" that destroyed so many farm families, but I have heard stories. The impact of "The Great Depression" was intensified because of the "Dust Bowl." Soil is not dead acreage, it is alive.
As an adult, I have developed a curiosity about composting. People take unwanted vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, lawn trimmings, eggshells, and paper items and with the diligent work of macro and micro-organisms, we end up with fresh, new compost. (There is much more to the science, but that is a simple explanation.)
Compost looks like soil, but it is actually a soil additive that makes the soil better than it was before. Soil is mostly mineral. Compost is mostly organic. Together, they provide a rich ground for growing.
Today, I could not help but think about all of the "garbage" that comes our way at times. Life is sometimes a stinky and smelly. Like the garbage that is added to the compost pile, some seasons in life can be a hot mess. But from that hot mess, God brings new life.
Somehow, in the honest, organic moments of sorrows, sadness, failures, brokenness, and disappointments, our Lord does the work that only He can do. The compost pile of our life becomes something that enriches the soil around us. I don't understand it all, but I know He never fails. He doesn't abandon us. He transforms us.
I find myself looking at the parable of the soil in Matthew 13 with new eyes.
"Still other seeds fell on fertile soil, and they produced a crop that was thirty, sixty, and even a hundred times as much as had been planted!" - Matthew 8:13
Fertile soil is better when mixed with organic compost. The "hot mess" of our lives can become the very thing that fertilizes our soil and gives us our testimony.
Today, I am grateful for composting.
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