Grundy's Blog

I spend a lot of my time maintaining our home. I weed; I paint; I clean. I often think about the family that will live in my home after I die. They won’t know if I was a Christian, or an atheist; they won’t know that we raised two beautiful children and allowed our grandchildren free reign; they won’t know that an elderly neighbor ran a meth lab down the street; they will never know how many deer I shot with paintballs; they will never know that I nearly divorced my wife; they will never know of my spiritual awakening after a good friend/mentor died; they will never know that we loved two border collies and buried them in the vegetable garden. My years living in this house will be forgotten.   Eventually, no one will know that I lived at 6085 Stanley, and as the song goes, “no one will know my name.”   John Piper suggests “in the minds of many modern people, my life will have been no more significant that what happens to a tree when it dies. It’s over. You go out of ...

Isaiah 5: 2 He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines.     I enjoy raking my fingers through good, fertile, smelly soil. The other day I started to dig a hole to plant a five-gallon azalea.   The tag on the plant said to dig a hole twice as big as the plant’s root ball. Not sure if the person who wrote these directions knows anything about the soil in our foothills. I was surprised when the first spading went down three to four inches. The soil was loose, fertile, easy to dig in.   I was euphoric. I am a gardener of cultivars. But my euphoria was short-lived. A boulder, the size of Rhode Island, prevented further digging. Jesus talks about a soil’s condition in the gospels. There is the fertile soil and the rocky soil and the weed infested soil. But what if the soil is fertile at the top and rocky at the bottom?   A plant may flourish for a year or two, but the roots' need to go deeper will be stunted by the rocks—u...