As long as the leaves keep falling, I can keep adding material to the slow compost pile. As long as the leaves keep falling, I can keep getting usable dirt (long-term). As long as the leaves keep falling, God is giving me what I need to grow my garden.
Hello Readers, hope all’s well. Time for another post in my new series, Natural Wisdom. In case you missed the first two posts, this is a series where I write about some of the lessons God has taught me, through nature. Because God teaches us so much through nature, if we’re willing to watch and listen to see and hear the Wisdom. God teaches us a lot about Himself, through nature. He teaches us about lots of topics.
Those lessons are the premise of this series.
The latest thing God has taught me through nature, is a Matthew 6-type lesson. Not the part about humility, but the part about how God provides us with everything we need, when we need it. Which is why we shouldn’t worry (as long as we’re trusting and following Him). God provides everything we need to live, things like food and so on. And more to the point of this series, He provides these things to us mainly through nature.
Well, I’m making a garden farm project on my land (the reason this series started, I work outside in nature every day now). And one thing we can’t do without when we want to grow food … is dirt!! Soil!! We need soil to grow anything, of course. But how do we get the soil for planting?? Do we have to buy it in the store, is that our only option??
No … God provides everything we need!! There is actually a way to, believe it or not, use what God has given us in nature to make new soil for planting. This is natural leaf composting. It’s a method that takes time, I won’t sugarcoat that. But it feels good to use what God has provided, to create more soil, to grow more plants and vegetables. It feels like God is working with us on the land, giving us materials (which many people see as waste) that we can turn into something useful.
It’s a great example, to me, of how in nature God provides us what we need. So read on, and let’s think about that.
God Gives what We Need, through Nature
I want to do my farming in the most natural and sustainable way. That only makes sense because I want to make the smartest and most efficient use of the resources God has provided us with here on earth. And I want to use everything that’s available to me—and I mean everything—and put it to use in farming if I can.
I learned from a local mentor that you can compost big piles of leaves into dirt or soil, which you can then use to plant a garden with. There are many, many videos explaining how to do this on YouTube. You can see for yourself. All you need to do is search YouTube for “natural leaf composting” (or anything like that) and you’ll get a ton of videos from many different channels. Yeah, seems like everyone’s doing natural leaf composting and sustainable farming. That’s cool.
This composting solution is a long-term one—very long-term. It’ll probably take six to eight months from my understanding, and eight months or longer seems likely. When it’s finished though, it will create plantable dirt I can use to grow vegetables and more. I’ve seen the results for myself, at someone else’s farm. Until then, I’m going to use pre-mixed, store bought potting soil to get my garden started now so I don’t have to wait eight months to plant something.
But sometime toward the end of the year, I should have usable planting dirt made from nothing but leaves and other natural refuse. Most people see this stuff only as waste. It feels great to take something that would otherwise be thrown away or ignored, such as fallen leaves and plant matter, and put it to a good use.
There’s no shortage of leaves at my place, as they keep falling off the trees. I live in the tropics so we don’t have a fall season, we only have hot weather here. We do have a rainy season in the wintertime, but that’s about it for different seasons. Other than that it’s hot all year long. Since we don’t have a fall, the leaves on the trees keep growing, dying, falling, and growing again all the time. It never stops, and I can always find plenty of leaves on the ground.
As long as the leaves keep falling, I can keep adding material to the slow compost pile. As long as the leaves keep falling, I can keep getting usable dirt (long-term). As long as the leaves keep falling, God is giving me what I need to grow my garden.
So the lesson I see in this is that God gives us what we need, in nature. This applies to life in general, and to nature in particular. If we look around the natural environment we live in, we should be able to find what we need for life as long as that environment has been cared for. God’s earth and its natural environment provide what we need.
To put it in other words, well, Matthew 6. God will provide what we need to live, if we trust Him for it. We get what we need, when we need it; and we were meant to get much of it from nature. That makes nature worth taking the utmost care of!!
(25) “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? (26) Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? (27) Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life? (28) And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. (29) But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these. (30) If God dresses grass in the field so beautifully, even though it’s alive today and tomorrow it’s thrown into the furnace, won’t God do much more for you, you people of weak faith? (31) Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ (32) Gentiles long for all these things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. (33) Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Matthew 6:25-33 (CEB)
Look around … See what He’s Giving
What we need may not look like what we expect though. Did you know leaves can be turned into usable, “plantable” dirt?? I didn’t know that, not before starting this garden farm project anyway. But it goes to show that, although God gives what we need, we may need to a) Wait for it, and b) Do some prep work to get it.
In the case of turning dead, fallen leaves into dirt, we get hit with both a) and b). First, we definitely have to wait. To get leaves to decompose into dirt, yeah, it takes a long time. We’re talking months here, many months. And also b), we have to do prep work. If we want to compost leaves, we have to rake them up, run over them with the lawnmower a few times to chop them up into flakes, and make a big pile of the chopped leaves. It’s not backbreaking work, it’s not hard work, but it is work nonetheless. And it’s work that must be done if we want the end result.
Still, as long as the leaves keep falling at my place (which they do year-round, since there’s no fall season), I can keep making dirt with this natural method. Yeah it takes a long time, but it makes what I need in the end. So in other words … as long as the leaves keep falling, God is giving me what I need.
If we look closely at the nature around us, we can see many other examples of how God gives us what we need to live on this earth. How many examples could we give?? Countless. So let’s be on the lookout for those examples, be Grateful for them, and take care of our natural environment in Gratitude for what God uses it to give us.
In nature, God gives us what we need. So what happens if we destroy our natural environment?? Then we can’t get what we need. Just one more reason why destroying the environment is offensive to God, and suicidal for ourselves. One more reason to care for God’s Creation, nature.
Like my content?? Leave a tip at https://ko-fi.com/999_the_end_is_now
Well that’s all for this week. If you enjoyed today’s post, be sure to Subscribe using the link below. And please consider Supporting My Blog using the Tip Jar: https://ko-fi.com/999_the_end_is_now. Any amount is much appreciated!!
Until next time, be strong and do good!!
Your new best friend in Christ,
99:9
<<<EXALT THE LORD OUR GOD AND WORSHIP AT HIS HOLY HILL; FOR THE LORD OUR GOD IS HOLY>>>
Follow My Blog
Subscribe to my FREE Substack newsletter so you never miss any of my posts!
https://999f64.substack.com/
99:9 Exalt El Shaddai 
One comment on “Natural Wisdom Part 3: Learning Matthew 6 from Fallen Leaves”