Get Your Hands Dirty

Every year around Earth Day, we get a burst of motivation. We buy the plants. We sketch the garden beds. We picture ourselves as the kind of people who casually harvest herbs at golden hour. And then, five minutes in, we remember gardening is dirty.

Not aesthetically messy. Actually dirty. Fingernails packed with soil. Knees damp from the ground. It turns out that one of the biggest barriers to tending a garden is the simple fact that you have to touch the earth.

Which, if you’ve spent any time in church, should sound familiar. In the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, Jesus heals a man born blind in a way that feels…a little uncomfortable. He spits on the ground, makes mud, and smears it on the man’s eyes. It’s not sanitized. It’s not distant. It’s deeply physical, a little strange, and undeniably earthy.

And before we rush to turn that into a neat metaphor about “seeing clearly,” it’s worth pausing. Blindness is not a problem to be fixed for someone to be whole or beloved. That’s not the point. The point is the method. The medium. The fact that healing, transformation, connection, it happens through contact. Through earth. Through the willingness to get our hands into something real. Which can make a lot of us *cough, especially Christians* uncomfortable.

Gardening teaches that whether we like it or not.

You cannot coax tomatoes out of avoidance. You cannot grow basil through good intentions alone. At some point, you have to kneel down and pay attention. What does this soil need? Is it dry? Compacted? Depleted? What has been taken from it, season after season, without being restored?

If we’re honest, those are justice questions too.

Because soil doesn’t just “fail” on its own. It gets overworked. Stripped. Neglected. Sound familiar? Communities do too. Neighborhoods do too. People do too. And the work of repair, the work of justice, is rarely clean. It asks something of us. Time. Proximity. Discomfort. The humility to admit we don’t fully understand what’s needed yet.

It’s easier to stay on the porch, admiring the idea of a garden. It’s easier to talk about “helping” from a safe distance. But nothing grows there.

Growth happens when we step in. When we learn the rhythms of a place. When we listen more than we assume. When we invest in the long, slow work of tending — not fixing, not saving, but tending.

And yes, it will get under your nails. But here’s the thing: that dirt? It’s not just mess. It’s possibility. It’s the place where seeds split open and become something more. It’s the place where life insists on pushing up through what looks like nothing.

So maybe this year, as you think about home and garden, you don’t aim for perfection. Maybe you aim for participation.

Plant something. Sure. But also pay attention to what you’re planting yourself in. What communities are you tending? What systems are you willing to get close enough to actually understand? Where might you need to stop hovering and start kneeling?

Because sometimes, the most sacred thing you can do is get your hands dirty.