The Widows Garden

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
-James 1:27

Several months ago we visited the church my parents attend. A missionary family to Uganda, the Probsts, were sharing their experiences from the field. Although many things about the day to day grit of their lives were striking, I was most challenged by the following story:

The fledgling church was made up mostly of recent converts. I don't recall all of the details clearly, but it seems that they had been given a very nice building to hold their services in. When they had made the decision to follow Christ rather than the "big man" in the church, they had lost the building, and been forced to meet under a tree. Passersby scoffed at the fools for losing their beautiful building.

The missionaries were able to purchase a parcel of land to give to the church, but made the decision that the Ugandans would have to build on the land with their own resources. Although they badly needed a building of some kind for their meetings, the first thing that they did was to cultivate a garden on the land. They called it the widows garden, and gave what grew there to the widows and orphans.

I cannot imagine that the scoffers had a lot to say after they started their garden. Here were people who cared enough about others that their first thought was not for their own real need, but for the need of the widows, who were truly destitute. Later on they built a building in their own style and with what they had. It was nothing like the building they had given up, but the church that meets there knows what is truly important.

I can't imagine tilling up the manicured front lawns of many of the churches here to plant gardens. In our culture that may not be a practical thing to do... but perhaps it should be something we would be willing to do.