Gardening as a Teacher of Prayer–The Rhythm of Planting, Pruning, and Waiting
Suppose prayer isn’t something you say at all. Suppose it’s something you grow — quietly, stubbornly, with dirt under your fingernails and knees resting on the edges of raised beds you once built to outsmart a body that wouldn’t always cooperate.
I didn’t plan to learn how to pray in a garden. But life, as it often does, had other ideas.
When Limitations Shape the Garden
I was in my twenties when multiple sclerosis arrived — uninvited, unwelcome, and uncompromising. At that stage of life, most people are busy building careers, raising children, and mapping out long stretches of assumed health. I was learning to live differently — not giving up, but figuring out how to go on.
I loved gardening. Still do. But MS forced me to think ahead. So I designed nine large raised beds — tall enough that if I needed to approach them in a wheelchair, I could. As it turned out, I often perched on the wooden edges, planting and pruning within reach, shaping the garden around what I could do, not what I couldn’t.
That, I’ve come to realize, is a kind of prayer in itself — not pleading for the storm to pass, but learning how to work with the weather you’ve been given.
The Planting: Trusting What You Can’t Control
There’s a strange humility in planting a seed.
You do your part — prepare the soil, drop the seeds at the right depth, cover them with care. But from there, you release control. You can’t coax the seed open by willpower. You can’t force the sprout to emerge on your timetable.
It’s trust work.
Early on, I thought prayer was mostly about words — finding the right ones, saying them in the right order. But as the years have gone on, I’ve learned that some of the most honest prayers sound like this: Here it is. I’ve done what I can. I’ll trust what I can’t see.
In the garden, I plant and wait. In life, I offer what I can and rest in something larger.
The Pruning: The Hard Edges of Letting Go
Pruning doesn’t come naturally to me.
Even now, years later, I hesitate before cutting away healthy-looking branches. It feels like loss — removing what seems full of potential. But gardeners know: too many branches compete for light. Too much growth crowds out the fruit.
The same is true in life, and I’ve lived it firsthand.
There have been seasons where MS forced me to prune — activities I couldn’t keep up with, roles I had to release, expectations that no longer fit. Some of that cutting back hurt. It still does, sometimes.
But oddly enough, pruning has also made space — for deeper relationships, for more attentive living, for the kind of joy that isn’t rooted in doing, but in being.
Pruning is hard. But it’s also holy work — a prayer whispered through clippers: Help me release what no longer serves. Help me nourish what matters.
The Waiting: Living Inside the Unfinished
And then comes the waiting.
The garden has always been my teacher here. After the seeds are planted and the pruning is done, there’s nothing left to do but tend and watch. Sometimes, honestly, it feels like not enough.
Waiting is hard when you’ve been taught to measure life by output, productivity, accomplishment.
But waiting — patient, attentive, faithful waiting — is its own form of prayer. It doesn’t require words. It only requires presence.
Over the years, I’ve watched seedlings break through soil I thought might stay barren. I’ve seen whole seasons surprise me with color and fruit when I had quietly braced myself for disappointment.
In my own life, too, the most surprising graces have often arrived not through effort, but through endurance — the slow, sacred work of staying present.
A Smaller Garden, A Larger View
Life shifted again, as it does. I moved to a smaller piece of land. This time, just a few raised beds — built the same way, anticipating what might one day be required.
And here’s the funny thing: I rarely sit on the edges anymore. Others do more of the digging and heavy lifting. I do more of the watching.
I sit, I listen, and I receive.
There’s a different kind of blessing that comes from watching others work — grandchildren learning how to pinch off basil leaves, neighbors offering a hand with the compost bin, friends sharing seeds across the fence. My role has shifted, but the prayer continues.
Sometimes I smile at the irony — that while my younger self fought to do as much as possible, my older self is learning the quiet art of receiving.
The Spiritual Seasons
The garden teaches me — as it always has — that life moves in seasons.
- There’s a season for planting — full of hope and trust.
- A season for pruning — painful, yes, but freeing.
- A season for waiting — quiet, slow, and filled with unseen work.
- And eventually, a season for harvesting — and for handing the harvest to others.
Each season has its own rhythm. Each offers its own prayer.
I used to think spiritual maturity meant having more answers. Now I think it may simply mean having a deeper willingness to live inside the questions — and to trust that what needs to grow will grow.
A Quiet Benediction
If you had asked me, back in my twenties, how I imagined my life would unfold, I certainly wouldn’t have described raised beds built for wheelchair access, or the many adaptations that followed.
And yet… I wouldn’t trade what the garden has taught me.
Not just about plants. About life. About grace. About how to stay present when you can’t control the outcome.
And about how prayer sometimes sounds like this:
I am here. I will tend what I’ve been given. And I will trust what I cannot see.
If this reflection speaks to where you are, I invite you to share it with someone who might need encouragement today. And if you’d like more quiet reflections like this — small seeds for your own journey — join me at The Reflective Pen newsletter. Together, let’s keep tending what’s been entrusted to us.
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