The City

I spent a year reading about inner city ministry.
Racism. Poverty. Burnout.

I spent months volunteering in the inner city.
The astonishment of being given a paperback book.
Complete financial illiteracy: “I bet you make $200 a month!”
Toothless meth mom. A child dropping out of seventh grade.
A young teen slept with fourteen boys in a weekend.
Eighty percent of the girls molested by age five.
Broken, broken, broken.

So the phrase, “It began in a garden and ends in a city”
Has sounded horrible to me, like the Bible works backwards.
Begin in a paradise, tended carefully, filled with fruit,

And end in a strip mall with graffiti, an enormous parking lot,
And some big box stores across the street, accessed only via
Stop lights, always red. This did not appeal to me.

I could adjust the vision some: the city has streets of gold.
(But what plants were paved over to get these streets?)
Presumably there will be no sirens or rusty rebar,
No burnt-out neon signs and no fast food.

But today I heard something that upended my understanding.

Start with a garden. The Creator gives the creation
The gift of co-creation. Trees produce more trees.
The world created one day will grow and develop the next day.
There is movement and transformation.

And we end with a city, which can be defined as:

A lot of organized gardens.

Is that not beautiful? Rather than one large, unsubdued garden,
We have beauty, order, responsibility, companionship,
All things in right relationship.

If the city now is fully broken because of the mass of broken people,
Think how glorious it will be, with the shalom of God
On us all.