Article May 21, 2012 Issue

Garden prayers

Janell Fiarman

It was a grim meeting of the community garden’s executive committee. We struggled to figure out how to address a member who wasn’t paying his dues or contributing his share of the work, and who had been rude and dismissive when the group’s coordinators called his attention to his delinquency. We wished he would just disappear. We read the bylaws carefully and decided that as the executive committee, we were totally justified in deciding to kick him out. It really seemed only fair to the rest of the community, who were fulfilling the requirements. 

I agreed to be the one to deliver the bad news. The scofflaw was a big guy who seemed kind of threatening to some folks, so another gardener offered to join me for protection, but I declined.

I think the offer of protection was what reminded me to stop and pray about the situation. It took a while to quiet the little mental debate I was having: What was the right thing to do, for him, for us, for the community? I needed to think about the situation from a different point of view—to get out of the little world of human personalities and even of the supposedly impersonal organizational bylaws. I wanted to try, in a sense, to see it from God’s point of view.