Noonday Notes, Issue 10

Issue No. 9

How’s Your Soil?

August 8th, 2025

How’s your soil? That was the question my old sponsor, whom I had not seen in a year and a half asked me when I ran into her at HEB on Sunday. If I’m honest, some thorns have grown up. Old ones. Choking out some of the good things I’m trying to grow. She was thinking of the Parable of the Sower; I was thinking back to last week’s “greenboarding” with Joel, our church’s Worship Pastor and what I call Minister of Analogy, and all the places the garden was taking us in metaphor.

“Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants.”
— Matthew 13:7

We are all sowers of seeds in our gardens of relationships. And our seeds fall on all kinds of soil: rocky, thorny, hard, fertile. The truth is, even good soil needs tending. Even fallow ground needs care. As I mentioned during Fallow July, I didn’t just leave the garden beds empty; I planted cover crops. Plants that may not feed us directly but restore the soil beneath. They anchor it, break it up, add nutrients, and prepare it to produce again.

Our lives and relationships are no different. Even when we’re not asking them to produce, they still need nourishment and not to be taken for granted. I’ve also been wondering: What kind of harvest do I hope for? Maybe it’s trust. Maybe it’s forgiveness. Maybe it’s showing up again, this time with less fear.

And then: What does that soil need to grow those things? We water seeds of trust with consistency. We grow forgiveness with light from honest conversations. We add compost made of repentance, humility, and the willingness to try again. These are slow crops. We don’t always know their maturity date. But we know this: seeds won’t grow in depleted soil.

This Saturday (August 9th) at the Noonday Farm at Grace, I (hopefully with some help) will be spreading compost on the land. No tilling yet (that’s August 16th). No planting. Just compost—death, decay, transformation. What has been broken down is now the very thing that brings life. That’s reconciliation. That’s redemption.

The next week we’ll till it in, fold it into the soil. And after that, we’ll plant. But before the harvest, before the green shoots, before anything else, we begin with the necessary work of nourishing our soil.

So I’ll ask you what was asked of me: How’s your soil? And perhaps a follow-up question as I work on real and metaphorical crop plans: What are you sowing into it right now?

Read the rest of the Noonday Notes here.