After the spring‑bearing rains have fallen three or four times, the lawns in front and behind the house burst forth in deep green light and fragrance, singing a full-throated hymn of joy. Watching the tender faces—hidden all winter—rise day by day on the sap-filled branches, my heart begins to stir with a needless but pleasant urgency.
No matter how busy and breathless life in the parsonage becomes throughout the year, cultivating a small garden in spring—growing vegetables and tending flowers—is one annual ritual I cannot give up. The quiet covenant with nature, that things grow as they are sown and yield as they are planted, brings me immeasurable joy and a deep spiritual rest. This year, as I pondered what to plant around the new parsonage, I decided to choose not annual flowers but climbing roses and grapevines—plants that, once rooted, bloom again each year. I ordered the seedlings, and within a few weeks the package arrived.
With excitement, I tore open the wrapping and imagined red, yellow, and white climbing roses intertwined, covering the parsonage walls. Their rich fragrance seemed already to drift through the windows, and I found myself humming. Then, as I carried the rough and rather scrawny grapevine seedlings, I pictured the heavy clusters of grapes that would one day fill my hands, and my heart swelled with a sense of abundance that made even King Solomon’s garden seem no envy at all.
Turning the soil once a year is a cheerful task. When I press my foot down and thrust the shovel deep, flipping the earth over, I feel both pity and apology for the pink earthworms—startled from their late-morning slumber—wriggling in panic. And not only the worms. Tiny microorganisms, whose names I do not know, dash toward the dimness in shock at the sudden flood of brilliant sunlight. Watching these small creatures, each surviving in the soil, I glimpse the tender hand of God who cares for and oversees every living thing. God’s promise through the soil never fails. Even without the scientists’ claim that a single seed can hold life for over ten thousand years, the mystery of the life God has hidden in the earth already overflows in the mountains and fields like a cup of blessing.
For years I planted annual flowers and vegetables around the parsonage. Yet until last year, I never harvested blossoms beautiful enough to satisfy, nor fruits worthy of delight. Though I tended them with care, the flowers were barely enough not to feel embarrassed, and the vegetables—pumpkins with only leaves and no fruit, or tomatoes that ripened too late and remained green, stiff, and bitter—often left me disappointed after a whole spring and summer of watering. I would mutter to myself, “This soil is too rough! It’s barren, with no nourishment at all—how could it bear fruit?”
One day, while speaking with a church member known as having a “green thumb,” I learned the secret. Her home was always overflowing with fresh vegetables and beautiful flowers, and neighbors often received gifts from her garden in summer. She told me that when autumn comes, she already plans what to plant and where for the next year, and orders the seeds in advance. Then, for soil exhausted by summer’s growth, she buys compost in early winter, mixes it thoroughly into the earth, and lets it rest all winter long. When spring arrives, she distinguishes between plants that need full sunlight and those that thrive without it, planting each in the right place. With regular watering and proper fertilizer, she said, they grow without much difficulty.
How often have we, claiming to believe in the Lord, labored in vain—sweating over fruitless tasks and flowerless efforts—because we lacked the Word and prayer? What harvest can we expect when we plant this and that in the desolate garden of our lives, hoping for abundance on a starving soul? Each day, countless calls and meetings push us into a flood of words. Yet how often do we share true words—words that are necessary, words that bless?
This year again, spring has come to us wrapped in its strange mystery. Those who stayed indoors now long to walk under the warm sunlight. In every heart rises a renewed passion to love. Beneath the drooping willow branches, one feels the urge to gaze across the wide fields and sing a song of love.
As this spring announces the birth of new life across the world, I wonder how many springs remain in my own life. Counting them on my fingers, I pause amid my busy days to look back at the “garden of my life.” And just as one digs into the soil to uncover hidden mysteries and treasures of life, I resolve this spring to uncover the mystery of God still sleeping within me. And so, waiting for the most beautiful and abundant blossom my life may yet bear, I begin again to cultivate spring.
— Yoon WanHee, April 18, 1994
Daily Sauntering 
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