She Planted Resurrection

This morning, I saw my neighbor—someone I haven’t seen in a while.

She sat on her walker at the edge of the orchard beside her home, morning light catching the curve of her face as she oversaw the rebuilding of the rows. Her voice was gentle—not frail—but sure, the way of someone who has already made peace with the truth.

I know she has cancer. I know her time here is short.

And yet, she shared how rebuilding the orchard brings her joy—how it gives her life—and she is going to take that life, every bit of it.

She told me about each new tree—each pear, each pomegranate, each plum and peach—planted with intention. How she is mapping a labyrinth beneath the canopy, weaving space for reflection into the rhythms of the land. How she’s adding a poetry box at the entrance, so neighbors can leave verses and take them too—words blooming beside fruit.

She will not see the orchard in full. Not the swelling of apples in summer, not the golden arc of sun through ripened limbs, not the footsteps of strangers circling slowly through the spiral she designed. But she is planting it anyway. Not for herself, but for us. And that—that—is her resurrection.

As I walked away from her, I realized I had just witnessed something holy. Not a miracle that undoes death, but one that repurposes it. One that takes the truth of mortality and presses it gently into the soil.

There is a line in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that echoes her story:

“What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44)

That’s resurrection—not just the promise of a world beyond this one, but the reimagining of this world by those who know they won’t remain in it.

My neighbor is sowing a spiritual body—crafted from apple branches, poetry, and grace. She trusts that what begins in weakness will rise in strength. That what she buries now in love will become food and path and presence for those she leaves behind.

And isn’t that the truest witness? Not to escape death, but to let it break open a blessing. Not to hoard time, but to give it away.

She will not walk the whole labyrinth. She will not see the children picking fruit from her trees. But she has already written resurrection into the earth.

She has already risen in us.

As we stand in the light of Easter, with its fierce promise that life is never truly lost but always rising again in some unexpected form, may we choose to live like my neighbor—planting beauty we may never see, offering gifts we will not gather, and writing love into the future. Let resurrection not only be something we hope for, but something we practice.

From "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Happy Eastertide!

Pastor Robin