A Good Gardener

“What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him?” Psalm 8:5

In the book “The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected”, Nik Ripken shares a lot of horror stories about the time he was in Somalia helping distribute food in a war torn country. One time his Somali chief of staff and right hand man, Omar Aziz, came into his office weeping. When he had calmed down enough to speak, he recounted that he was walking down a street when he noticed a malnourished woman sitting against a tree nursing a baby. He greeted her and she smiled back. When he returned the same way after finishing his errand, the woman and her baby were still there. This time the baby was squirming and whimpering, but the woman was not moving. In the brief time since he had passed, the young mother had died. 

He took the child, and was able to find some people who gave the woman a proper burial. It took him some time before he found a nursing mother whose child had just died to take care of the baby. But the experience was just too much for this man who had seen so much heartache already. “My poor country! What is going to become of us?”

Today, the UN is warning that Somalia is facing its worst drought in forty years and of course a devastating famine. Oxfam, the aid agency, says that one person is likely to die every 36 seconds between now until the end of the year. This while the country is still recovering from a brutal two-decade civil war that has damaged almost every sector of the country. There are many heartbreaking stories about how the Somalis have been taken advantage of, brutalized, and used as pawns by warring clans. More than 500,000 people have died since the start of the devastating famine and civil war in Somalia. 

So much death. So much pain. But in God’s eyes, death is not a thing to be feared. A murderer, a virus, can only kill the body. It does not kill the forever part of us, our soul. That is why it is important to tend our souls. God is our partner in taking care of our souls. As St. Teresa of Avila, whose feast day we celebrate today, wrote in the book about her life, “Beginners must realize that in order to give delight to the Lord they are starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. Now let us keep in mind that all of this is already done by the time a soul is determined to practice prayer and has begun to make use of it. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don’t wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment for this Lord of ours. Then He will often come to take delight in this garden and find His joy among these virtues.”