Stop Praying for Good Soil
Put your hands in the dirt & stay awhile
Growing up in evangelical spaces, I heard talks and sermons and illustrations on the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9; 18-23) innumerable times. I would wager, of Jesus’s parables, it is probably top 3 in terms of fame and being taught on—the other two being the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
If you are not familiar with it, Jesus tells a story to a crowd about someone who sows seeds on four different soils: a path, rocky soil, thorny soil, and good soil. A few verses later, Jesus explains the parable to just his disciples after they inquire as to why Jesus teaches in parables. Jesus explains to them that the different soils represent different postures of receptivity to the message of the Kingdom of God, or the message of the Gospel, or the message of salvation. (It wasn’t usually about the kingdom, but about receiving Jesus.) We were told, exhorted, challenged to make sure we were the good soil. Is your heart a vessel to receive Jesus’s message, or are you like the other three soils too caught up in the world and anxiety to hear what Jesus might be wanting to speak to you?
If you grew up in similar spaces, you can probably still feel the scene in your body. “Eyes closed, every head bowed, what soil are you tonight? Are you ready to be the good soil and receive Jesus?” Whether in your youth group or at Summer Camp during cry night (yes cry night at camp is a real thing), you know and feel what I am talking about.
Even though I am slightly poking fun at this event, I do think there is some merit in the parable and the challenge to all of us, young and old, to continually cultivate a posture where we are the good soil. My issue isn’t with the use of the parable, but with where it stopped. We were challenged to be good soil, but beyond that, we were left aimless and clueless.
What is good soil?
Good soil does not come about willy-nilly, nor by accident, nor quickly. Good soil is rich and teeming with life. Good soil is a vast interconnected system of bacteria, microbes, and other living things working in harmony to nourish and provide beauty and nutrients needed for plants, flowers, fruits, vegetables to grow.
In his book, Soil: The Incredible Story of what Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy, Matthew Evans describes good soil as being like chocolate cake: “Like a good cake, it holds together well until you crumble is. It smells sweet. Unlike cake, it is also rich with visible life, both of the fungal and springtail type (springtails are like soil mites). You can also see worms. Lots of worms” (p. 18).
Further down on the same page, Evans writes:
Chocolate cake soil has something called ‘tilth’. Tilth is a wonderfully descriptive word for the texture of soil all growers strive for. It crumbles gently through your fingers when loosened, and clumps gently together (not stickily like clay) when pressed. Tilth demonstrates the capacity of soil to absorb and retain moisture in a way that doesn’t cause waterlogging.
Soil is more than just dirt. Soil is beautiful and made up of more living organisms than we can imagine. As many of us are becoming more and more aware, good soil produces good food, more flavorful food. The same being true of wine.
And yet none of this is natural or easy. It is springtime, which means for those who garden, the time is ticking to get the garden ready after allowing it to lay fallow during winter. This requires tilling the soil, mixing in compost, finding some natural fertilizer.
Sure there are easier ways. Using highly processed fertilizers and soil from big companies. And then buying seedlings from those same big companies with plants suited and engineered for those chemicals. Maybe those steps help you start gardening, but hopefully we all grow past that and into something more beautiful but also more difficult.
Developing good, rich soil takes time, years. But as we understand soil more, and are able to work in harmony with the earth and our unique climate, we develop something that will last. And also we will develop something that will produce more beauty and more tasty fruits and vegetables that also will carry with them more of the nutrients are body needs.
But this is the hard work of soil.
And this is the hard work of growth.
It is all too easy to say I want and desire to be good soil. It is quite another thing to engage in the hard work to cultivate the soil. It requires not just me, but living in codependent relationships with others, seeing them as partners for all of our flourishing and not competition. It will require tilling and pruning those parts of me that are not conducive to growth—again not just my growth, but all of creation. Character habits of greed, sexism, homophobia, racism, arrogance, lust, resentment, divisiveness, idolatry…the list goes on.
Central to this will be humility. As many scholars have pointed out humility and human both derive from a similar root of humus, which is a Latin word for soil. Our humanity is inextricably tied to humus and humility. The soil from which we were formed, and the humility to admit how little we actually know, and the humility to recognize and celebrate the beauty of the community and the individual.
When we cultivate humility, grounded in the soil, we are more apt to recognize that different seeds and different seasons require different processes and nuance. That when I try and apply a one-size-fits-all approach to growth, I am more likely to usurp and work against the soil, whether literal or metaphorical.
Maybe this season as you work in your garden, as your hands touch and feel the soil, as it gets caked under your fingernails, consider in humility your own personhood and what you might need to flourish in this season. And also consider your community and what others might need that you can offer.