Noonday Notes, Issue 25
Burying Talents
Noonday Notes
Issue No. 25
November 21st, 2025
Last night in the dark before the big rain, a group of women pushed garlic into the soil. Pieces of promise that disappear from sight for months. Planting garlic always feels a little like burying treasure. You hide something precious in the ground and then wait, trusting that what you cannot see is still alive, still working, still becoming.
I’ve stayed with parables this week ahead of planting garlic, specifically the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:13-30), where a master entrusts his servants with enormous gifts called talents. The master leaves them to decide what to do with them. Two servants take what they’ve been given and risk using them. One servant, afraid, buries his gift in the ground.
We both buried something in the soil, one is an act of fear and the other an act of faith. When we plant garlic, we’re doing the faithful kind of burying. We’re saying with our hands what our hearts sometimes struggle to say out loud. I trust that God works in hidden places. I trust that what feels buried isn’t lost. I trust that small offerings, entrusted back to Him, will grow.
The fearful servant in the parable believed the master was harsh, so he hid what he had. He buried his gift to protect it. But what he really protected was his own fear, and that fear produced nothing.
Planting garlic pushes against that instinct in all of us. We take something useful, a clove we could cook with today, and we let it go. We place it underground where we can’t watch it, control it, or rush it. We surrender it to a process we don’t manage but can only tend. This is what trust looks like. This is what faithfulness looks like. It’s like God saying risk what I’ve given you because I am good.
In a few months, those cloves will become whole bulbs. Pretty epic. The math of the kingdom is always generosity. Always multiplication. Always more abundance than we could imagine.
May we remember that some things are buried because they are dead, but some things are buried because they are seeds. May we bury our garlic and our hopes out of faith rather than fear. Trust the generosity of God, give back what we’ve been given, and enter into His joy.