Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again. I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden. Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted. Even my toil. I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke .  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by tw...

Dear Eugene, Last Saturday we were building garden boxed in front of our church, and finally filled them with soil donated by the city.  Part of the condition of this most generous gift is that we'll involve the community in the garden planting, growing and flourishing. We worked hard non-stop all day, and at the end were left with maybe one-third of what was given us, which is a lot.  I wrote up a sign "Free Soil: Full of Grace" and staked it on the soil. People told me after I left that in about half an hour the soil was cleaned up.  Some related to me specifics about size of vehicle that came and the enthusiasm in the air, which smelt of PNE farmhouse. I wonder if Jesus were there, whether he would come up with a parable.  I wonder if it would go something like this (by the way, I was not there; so the following is a complete fabrication on my part): ******* There was a church at the fringe of a marginalized neighborhood, small in ways more than on...