September 2026

My garden is loosely organized into zones, each a little microclimate that houses the plants best suited to its particular sunlight and watering needs. Zone 1 houses tomatoes and squash, peppers and lavenders—all of which need a lot of sun to be happy. Zone 2 is home to my cucumbers and eggplants, along with a stackable planter of various herbs. Oh, and more lavenders.

Yeah, it’s a thing. ;-)

And then there is Zone 3.

Early on, I began thinking of this as my “Zen Zone.” I realized that I spent a lot of time monitoring the visual cues of the vegetables in Zones 1 and 2: What’s flowering today—and are those flowers male or female? Are these leaves supposed to be yellowing like this? Are those new fruits going to develop to maturity or abort in all this heat?

In Zone 3, however, the rhythm of growth is different. This is where my leeks and beets and onions and asparagus are planted. This is the zone where much of what’s happening is happening underground, and the growth isn’t always obvious.

This reminds me of our spiritual journey.

So much of our formation is hidden beneath the surface of our everyday lives. We sometimes expect that our transformation toward wholeness and the full image of God is going to be marked by dramatic occurrences—“Damascus Road” experiences, if you will. But the truth is that real growth often happens in slow and subtle ways, and the most important growth isn’t necessarily the growth we can see.

We engage spiritual practices. We learn to become increasingly aware of the presence and work of the Spirit. And…we wait—trusting that transformation and growth will occur.

And it does.

In my own journey, I’ve discovered that, much like my Zone 3 plants, the signs of growth are not always glaringly obvious. But they are there if we learn to be patient enough to notice them.

In my garden, over time:

• the beets quietly became actual beets while I was staring at leaves;

• the leeks have been slowly building themselves, reaching higher but also deeper into the soil;

• the Heshiko onions have just steadily kept going, seemingly unperturbed by whatever the weather brings;

• the radishes, which were supposed to be little round globes but turned out to be long and straggly instead, taught me that not everything planted produces what we expected;

• and my asparagus—nicknamed Dizzy, after the jazz legend—is producing a glorious crown of ferns this year, becoming perhaps the ultimate illustration of investing lavishly in what will nourish future growth. There is no harvest expected this year, but there is confidence in the growth to come.

Perhaps this is part of what St. Teresa of Ávila teaches us when she prays, “Let nothing disturb you…Patience obtains all things.”

There are seasons when growth asks us to pay attention to what is emerging. And there are seasons when growth asks us simply to tend what has been planted and trust what is happening beyond our sight.

So, I invite you to sit with this question in your quiet time:

Can I trust the work of growth before I have evidence of the outcome?