A Strip Beside A Parking Space

There is a strip of dirt beside where you park and you have never once thought of it as ground.

It is about eighteen inches wide. It runs along the wall. It has that compacted grayish look that soil gets when nothing has been done to it and cars have been going past it for years, and there is probably some gravel worked into the top of it.

You have walked over it several thousand times.

And in all of that, it has been a gap. A place where the concrete stops. Not soil, in the way that a bed is soil. Just the leftover bit between the parking space and the wall.

You are standing on ground, and a hard strip beside a parking space has never once been anything else.

Let me say what I think has happened, because I do not think you have ever dismissed that strip.

Dismissing it would require noticing it first. And you have not noticed it, not in the sense of actually looking at it, because it does not belong to any of the categories your eye uses. It is not garden. It is not path. It has no name, so it does not get seen.

That is a different thing from having decided it is no good.

And it means there is no argument to win here. There is only a thing to look at properly for the first time.

The desert shall rejoice, and blossom

There is a line in Isaiah that names the least promising ground available and puts the flowering there.

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. (Isaiah 35:1, King James Version)

The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

Now, notice which ground gets chosen for that sentence. Not a field. Not a valley. The wilderness, the solitary place, the desert. Three names for ground that nobody was cultivating and nobody expected anything from.

You are looking at a verse that went out of its way to name the worst ground available, and God has never once located that promise on the good soil. Isaiah 35:1 picks the desert on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man standing beside a parking space.

And there is a phrase in the middle that is easy to walk past. The solitary place.

That is not a description of the soil. That is a description of how much attention it gets. The solitary place is the place nobody goes to, the ground that is not on anybody's route, the piece that gets passed rather than visited.

Which is a rather exact description of eighteen inches beside a car.

You have ground that matches the description in that verse more closely than a garden would, and a place nobody looks at has never once been outside what that sentence was about. The Holy Spirit is the one who names the overlooked place specifically, and the written word puts the solitary place in the list rather than leaving it out.

And notice that the ground is the subject of the verbs. The desert shall rejoice. The wilderness shall be glad.

It is not that something gets done to the desert. The desert does the rejoicing. There is something in that ground that responds, and the verse credits the ground with it.

You are dealing with soil that has something in it rather than soil that is inert, and hard ground has never once been the same thing as dead ground. The Spirit of God is the one who works in what looks like nothing, and the word makes the desert the one doing the rejoicing.

What is actually under there

Let me be practical about that strip, because there is a fact about it that changes the picture.

The top two inches are compacted and the rest of it probably is not.

That is how it works with ground that has been walked and driven past. The surface takes all of it, gets hard, sheds water, and looks lifeless. Underneath, it is often perfectly ordinary soil that has simply had a lid on it.

You have been assessing a lid.

You are looking at the surface of something rather than the thing itself, and two compacted inches has never once been a report on what is underneath them. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows what is under a hard surface, and Isaiah 35:1 addresses ground that looked entirely finished from above.

And there is a second thing about that particular strip which is genuinely in its favor, and nobody expects it.

It is against a wall. Which means it gets heat off the brick in the evening, and shelter from the worst wind, and often a bit of extra water running off the hard standing when it rains.

That is not a poor site. In several respects that is a better site than the middle of a lawn.

You have a piece of ground with real advantages that nobody has ever counted, and a wall at the back of a strip has never once been a disadvantage to anything growing in it. The Spirit of God is the one who put the conditions there long before anybody looked, and the written word promises blossoming in the least likely place on the list.

Turn one spadeful over

So here is the assignment, and it is an act of looking rather than an act of gardening.

Put a fork in it once, turn one spadeful over, and look at what is under there.

One. Not the strip. One forkful, anywhere along it, turned over and left sitting on the surface.

You are able to look under a lid without committing to anything, and one turned spadeful has never once been the beginning of a project. Isaiah 35:1 names the desert and the solitary place as the ground in question, and the Holy Spirit is the one out there with a man putting a fork into a strip beside his car.

And then actually look at it. That is the whole assignment and it will take about twenty seconds.

Is it dry all the way down or damp underneath. Is it the same color two inches down. Is there anything living in it, and there usually is, and finding a worm in ground you had written off is a genuinely useful thing to have happened to a man.

You are gathering information about a piece of ground you have owned the use of for years and have never once examined.

You are able to find out something true about a place you have walked over a thousand times, and twenty seconds of looking has never once been too little to change what a man thinks he has. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an honest look at something, and the word puts the rejoicing in the ground itself rather than in what somebody brings to it.

And then leave the forkful sitting there. Do not tidy it back. Let there be one turned lump of soil beside your car for a week, so that every time you get out you see that somebody has been in that ground.