The Garden You Didn't Plant

When Jesus said "deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me," many of us heard that as a call to quiet suffering. But Rachel Held Evans once reminded us that the cross was Rome's tool of execution for dissidents — people who threatened the status quo. To take it up is not passive endurance. It is active resistance.

Consider the community garden on Elm Street that replaced a vacant lot in a redlined neighborhood. The volunteers who show up every Saturday morning are practicing a peculiar kind of self-denial. They are denying the myth that someone else will fix it. They are denying the comfortable theology that says salvation is only spiritual, only personal, only later.

A retired teacher hauls compost. A teenager who came out last year and lost half her church finds belonging between the tomato rows. A former pastor who deconstructed his faith and rebuilt it from the rubble distributes peppers to elderly neighbors who cannot drive to a grocery store.

None of them would call this heroic. It is just Tuesday. And yet this is what daily cross-bearing looks like when we stop spiritualizing it into abstraction — ordinary people choosing solidarity over convenience, choosing the downward path Jesus actually walked.