In the spring of 2020, my husband and I decided that despite our brown thumbs and being city-raised, we would embark on a new adventure: we planted a garden. 

Now, I knew going into this experience that the chances of us growing a successful, vibrant garden were pretty slim. All my life, I have never kept a plant alive before. I’ve killed many a lily, dozens of poinsettias, bushels of rose bushes have met their death under my care, and I’ve even managed to melt a few fake plants in the backseat of a car in the Arizona summer. But my husband wanted to try planting a garden.

We gave it our best try, following every piece of advice we could find between Pinterest and Youtube, but despite our efforts, the only thing we grew were baby bunnies. This year, we accepted that we are not garden-growing kinds of people. 

Through the process of attempting to grow a garden, however, I learned that to grow a plant to its very best flowering, leafy self, it needs to be planted in broken ground. To grow successfully, you have to start with soil that’s been broken up. 

Now, in Phoenix, the ground is so hard that when it rains, the rain doesn’t soak into the earth: instead it floods the desert. Most people out there don’t even try to grow grass in their front yards: they just fill the yard with gravel and rocks. But in Kansas, the ground is easier to work with: when people around here go to start their garden, they break up the ground and it actually breaks. 

After the soil is broken apart, it softens which allows the needed water to reach the little seeds and sprouts we plant and help them grow. Makes sense right? Brokenness brings life and growth to the plant. 

About five years ago, my husband and I were not growing spiritually. In fact, we felt defeated in our marriage, our ministry, and in our life. We felt stuck and stifled serving in a place with a calling we didn’t understand. We were not growing and our life and relationship were hard. 

And then my best friend (who was also my uncle) passed away suddenly at age 33. The toddler who laughed at me when I learned how to walk, the boy who nearly took my eye out multiple times when we were playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the boy who taught me how to play my first video game, the boy who called my former boyfriends idiots when they were mean to me in high school, the boy who stayed up until past midnight the night before my wedding to help me finish all the little last minute things I hadn’t prepared for – he was just… suddenly… gone. 

I was devastated and broken the day I received the news. I had been on my way home from work, but I had to stop driving because I couldn’t stop shaking. 

We traveled out to the middle of nowhere, Kansas, to attend his funeral at a church I had never visited before. That weekend, before we headed back home to Phoenix, the pastor asked my husband to fill in for the music director because several people in the church had come down with the flu. This meeting lead the pastor to ask my husband to come back to candidate for a youth pastor position. 

Still reeling from the death of my best friend and shocked by this sudden offer from a pastor we had just met, we flew back to Phoenix and started fasting and praying. As most of you know, we took the position and moved out to Kansas just a couple of months later. We are more happy here than either of us has ever been in our entire lives, but if you had asked me on that day in January when I received the news that a person I loved so much had died long before the time I thought he should have died if his death would be worth any change it brought to my life, I would have told you no. 

My humanity wants to hold on to the people I love and the circumstances I choose more than any change that God brings to my life. Women especially tend to not like change. We like stable, steady, and dependable circumstances and people. We do not like change… but it is only through change that we can grow. 

Some changes are not as difficult as others, but God is able to lead us to personal, spiritual growth through every change – through every brokenness– that we have.

If you ask the average Christian if they want to grow spiritually, they will almost certainly say yes. Most Christians want to grow, but we’re not willing to let go of the hardened parts of our hearts, our wills, or our thoughts to accept the changes God brings to our life in order to grow. 

God’s Word tells us in Psalms 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” 

Maybe right now, you’re feeling broken by the circumstances of your life. You’ve lost someone that you love. Someone has hurt you deeply. A friend has betrayed you. You’ve lost your job due to the pandemic. Maybe you’re overwhelmed by the day-to-day circumstances that just seem to lend themselves to heartache and anxiety and fear. In whatever brokenness you are experiencing today, there is hope for growth out of this broken ground. 

While God does not need our sadness to prove His strength or ability,  He does offer to redeem our brokenness – to accept our sacrifice of a broken heart – to grow us into the women He knows we can be. He promises to comfort us through the broken circumstances of our life and to provide us with all we need to make it through each day. Jesus promises us in John 14:18, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.”

And so I ask myself every day, can I trust God to bring His glory from the brokenness of my life? Can I trust that when something breaks in my day, God is able to redeem it in His sufficiency? I can trust Him and I know that He will bring growth out of brokenness if I will let Him.

Brokenness can bring growth if we’re willing to trust God with our broken hearts. The Master Planter only wants us to grow. As 2 Peter 3:18 says, “But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.”