Ever since I was a little girl, there was always a bin in the corner of the kitchen, that my mum used to put all the peelings from the raw vegetables in. She would also wash out the egg shell and out them in the same bucket.
Every so often, one of my sisters or myself would be asked to take the bucket and chuck it onto the compost heap. This consisted of a big pile of grass cuttings, rotting vegetables and other detritus in a dark corner of the garden behind the shed. There were usually a few flies around and quite a lot of worms and it didn’t smell very nice either.
At the end of the year, my dad would then put the compost around the garden to feed the flower beds and he always used to describe it as a “lovely drop of stuff” and shout for my mum to come and smell it, which was strange to me at the time. However, I have since learnt, as I too am a composter, that when it is broken down properly, it smells lovely - a bit like earth after the rain or the floor of the wood.
I have constructed a new compost heap this year with loads of space to rot down and an area to start the second compost heap as the first one is left alone to decompose. My gardener, Steve, was distributing last year’s compost around the garden - it was full of worms and fed the borders beautifully.
There was so much life in what was just a broken down pile of vegetable and grass peelings. Somehow, through chemical reactions and time, everything had changed from being rotten to having life and feeding the rest of the garden.
If this was a horticultural blog, I could explain the process, but as it isn’t, I will explain why I have written about this.
I felt God spoke to me through my smelly, rotting heap of old vegetable peeling. Our life before Jesus was like that. We were dying and dead in our sins but Jesus gives us new life and even the most rotten vegetable can be transformed into worm-filled, fabulous earthy compost that feeds and nourishes the gardens and produces great fruit and vegetables, I might add.
How thankful am I that daily, God forgives me, renews my life and, by one degree of glory to another, I am transformed by the love and by the blood of Jesus.
Jill Jackson