I love this time of year! This is the time of year to get the garden tilled up and even get a few things in the ground (if you can find a few dry days). This is my fourth year tilling up the same small area for my garden. The first year was rough. The ground had never been worked before, so it was packed and tough. And the rocks!!! My yard is really just a pile of sandstone that’s pretending to be dirt. I have pulled thousands of pounds of rocks out of my garden over the past few years. However, I finally pulled out so many that by the end of last season I could take the tiller around the entirety of my garden and not dig up any rocks bigger than a lemon. But then the ground just sat from about late September until now. And lo-and-behold, when I tilled it last week, I unearthed some rocks. And not just little apple and orange sized rocks. Some were as big as a football (see the picture above). This happens every spring. It blows my mind to think that six months ago, this ground was pretty well manicured. I would attest that my garden spot was free of football-sized rocks. But without the daily attention I was giving it, big heavy problems started showing up.
It’s easy to think that once we have removed sin from our lives that we are good-to-go. We’ve resisted a temptation, or had compassion on someone who didn’t earn it, or been genuinely repentant of something wrong. “Whew. Glad I got those rocks pulled out. My garden is doing pretty good now.” But rocks will appear in an unattended garden just like sin will appear in an unattended faith. No matter how good of shape it was in, it still requires daily maintenance.
It’s time to till your garden (both physically and spiritually) and see what rocks need to be pulled out.