Compost

the REST of the week #166

It’s the rest of the week. How about we celebrate our compost?

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

At first glance, the compost pile is a stinky, rotten mass of whatever didn’t get used. Garbage that doesn’t have value, that gets thrown out.

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Think for a minute about anything in your life now (or in the past) that feels like waste—particularly efforts that didn’t seem to produce anything.

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Back to compost.

Even if you aren’t a gardener, you probably know the value of compost—those leaves, food scraps, and garden waste that break down into the rich, nourishing soil that helps plants thrive—and produce.

Could it be that those efforts you deem unproductive might actually function something like compost? That the thoughts and feelings of your lived experience actually enrich the soil of your life so that growth happens in natural and organic ways? And it’s not about the immediate outcome, but the process?

Jesus illustrates God’s kingdom with a number of parables and one of my favorites is this one recorded in the Gospel of Mark (4:26-27):

“…A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how."

God’s work in us is like that. It happens on its own, unseen and unforced. God is at work—even when we can’t see it—and everything goes into that process.

Nothing is wasted.

Shall we celebrate our compost and rest—right where we are, right now?

May your rest be sweet.

Alicia