Every morning as I step out my back door I smile. Our backyard in this season is a riot of blue and yellow flowers. There is new life springing up all over. I love the colors, the vibrancy, and the growth. Now lots of other people looking at my backyard would see a mess. They would call those flowers I love weeds. They would see the giant rosemary bush, the disintegrating garden beds, and the rusty old clothesline and judge it all as ugly or messy. For me, there is something so cool about that clothesline. It’s a harkening back to another way of life. It’s something that has been in our yard for years, maybe all 89 years the house has been here. I love the lines it makes against the sky when I’m in the hammock and it’s been useful as a bottle opener holder at parties. There’s something compelling about watching nature creep over the yard. As the dirt spills out of the garden beds and the wood crumbles I see the ways that our attempts to control and constrain the organic and the innate are all fleeting. 
I enjoy the gorgeous landscaping of our neighbors, their well-planned arrangements of space and plant. Yet as I walk through the neighborhood and witness my community’s attempts at landscaping and yard care I am always drawn to the more wild spaces, the yards that almost seem dangerous in their outrageous profusion of plant and art.
For three years in college, I worked as a summer gardener for the city of Albany. I spent my time deadheading petunias, making perfect the flower beds, watering the grass, and edging the lawns. I cut down weeds and watered trees. What I made was beautiful and enjoyed by lots of folks, but even though I learned all these skills you won’t find me practicing them in my garden. You see, there is something for me that is like the way I know God in our wild garden. The well ordered and controlled expressions of faith aren’t for me. The God I know is Aslan, is the roaring sea, is the creeping vines, the colors of life, the whisper of danger, the space of transformation.
I suspect this might be part of what makes me a good church planter, this might be part of why people always talk about my authenticity, and this might be part of why our family has chosen a life of messy, unusual work.
As we head into summer Jeff’s Midwestern roots will get the better of my wildness and he’ll mow down the flowers (weeds) and we’ll plant some lettuce or herbs in what’s left of the beds. I’ll spend my summer watching those plants once again be consumed by the wildness in our midst as I rock in the hammock and enjoy the rusty shapes cast by that old clothesline. And all the while I will be rejoicing in our persistent, vibrant God.
-Eilidh
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