Freedom Friday: Your Growth Requires Digging and Dying

Hello everybody and welcome once again to the Unlearned podcast. I am your host, ruth Abigail aka RA, and this is Freedom Friday, where me, or me and a friend of mine, come and share something we have unlearned this week or recently and how it has made us just a little bit more free, alright, so a couple of weeks ago, few weeks ago, my husband came and told me. He said, babe, I want us to do a garden, I want us to plant a garden. I said okay, alright, so what does that mean? Because you have to understand, like I'm from Houston, texas no gardens, we don't plant gardens. I did not plant gardens in Houston, right, that's not the type of lifestyle I had growing up and Houston is a fourth largest city. I didn't, I never planted no garden.

My husband is from Swainsboro, georgia, two very, very different places to grow up. There are lots of gardens in Swainsboro, right, he knows this idea of land and cultivating land and planting and all the things. I don't even know all the language, right? So when he said we're going to plant a garden, I was like, okay, I have no idea what that means. And so we, you know, first thing, we got the seeds and he got the seeds, whatever tomato, cucumber, peppers and some other things, bunch of seeds, right, it's okay. Now, now, what do we do? He said, well, now we have to get a tiller, and we have to, we have to, we have to till the ground. I said, okay, what does that mean? So we go to Home Depot, we get the, the tiller, and it's this. I don't know if you, I had never seen this before. All right, so this is all brand new to me. Y'all might know exactly what this stuff is. I have no idea, right. So we get the tiller. This tiller is basically like a it's. It's like a large, it's a pretty big machine. Almost looks like a lawnmower, but it's got these really thick blades on the bottom and when you, when you turn it on the blades, just start spinning and start digging in the ground, it is extremely taxing to do.

It takes took us about an hour and a half to till a part of our yard and it's really hard. I couldn't do it for longer than about 15, 20 seconds. So my husband really took the bulk of that and I just kind of went behind and raked it. You got to have some level of strength that I don't have right In order to do that. Those of you that know what I'm talking about, you understand what I'm talking about.

So we did that, all right, and so we till the ground, we got all the grass off uh, most of it and you could see, all of a sudden, it's, it's just dirt, like it's just dirt. And then I said, okay, what's the? What's the next step? He said, okay, we got to go get some lime and we have to do it too. We have to put it over the dirt, right. I said, what's that gonna do? He said it's gonna kill anything else that is in the ground and it's going to basically do what we couldn't do with the tilling, all right. So I said, okay, then what? Then he just planted the seeds, right, okay.

So again, some of y'all might understand all this. This may be regular information to you, To your girl. I didn't know what this was. I was really fascinated and I, watching this process and participating in the process made me understand, honestly, a lot of the parables that we see in the Bible when it comes to farming, way more right and just. This principle of sowing and reaping just comes to life in such a profound way, and one of the things. That was so eye-opening to me was what this tilling process was. So the tilling process you have grass that's been there for a long, long time and you have dirt under the grass and all this stuff, but it's been there for a long time. It got whole bunch of stuff growing in there. You don't know what it is, and so in order to grow something new out of the ground, the first thing you have to do is prepare the ground, so you have to till it. Like I said, the tilling process is extremely difficult. It also is not quick. You can't just do it in a few minutes.

When I think about, like, what that means for us, how many of us want to grow Like, we wanna grow, we wanna produce different fruit, we want to be different people, we want to change in some way. Right, a lot of us have that desire. So what is it that we have? The first thing that we have to do in order to do that, we have to be tilled. We have the ground that's been there forever has to be broken up and destroyed in order for something new to happen in your soul. That and that process is painful and it's taxing, and it's long and it's hard and it's something that has to be done. And I think that a lot of us say we wanna grow, say we wanna change, say we want something different, but we aren't willing to go through the tilling process. We're not willing to allow God or life, or sometimes other people, to work us enough and dig up enough of the old in order for us to prepare something new.

It is not easy, and I think a lot of people resist that process. I know I have in the past. We resist it and then we wonder why do we not have anything growing Right? And so one thing we have to unlearn if you wanna grow, the soil of your soul has to be uprooted, it has to be prepared, and that process is going to be painful. It's gonna be painful If you ever get a chance to watch somebody till the ground. Just watch them do it and see what the ground goes through. See what the ground goes through. It ain't fun, it's not fun. And so we have to know that that's part of the process.

And then that second part right, because some things take longer to go away than others and sometimes, just like on the ground, right After we till it, we gotta put the lime on top of it to then do what the tilling didn't do, and the lime has to stay there untouched for about two weeks. So, whatever the tilling process doesn't do, sometimes another layer that has to stay longer has to do in order for you to actually be prepared for growth. So you have to be tilled, gotta dig, and then stuff, stuff has to just die. You have to be dug into and then some stuff just has to die. Some things just have to take time to just die and go away in order for you to be ready to grow something different.

We have to unlearn that this process can be skipped or rushed through. It can't be. But here's the beauty of it. When the beauty of it is after that part is done, then it's easy. The next part is easy because then all you're doing is putting the seed in the ground and you know that the seed is gonna produce the fruit, not just because that's what a seed does, but because the ground is ready for it. The ground is ready for it. So you know the seed is gonna produce the fruit because the ground is ready, and you also know that at some point there is not anything else you can do but wait. The right weather conditions have to be the case and the right timing has to be the case, but your work is done, then it's just a process, and so I hope this is I know.

When I again, when I saw this process play out in real life, it just opened up my eyes to the necessity of going through the process of digging and dying, and that is not something that is popular. But if we want growth, if you want change, if you want to be different, if you want the unlearning that's happening in your life to actually stick and to produce something better, you gotta go through the digging process and you have to be willing for things to die. And so, man, if you haven't planted a garden before, do it. Even if it's just to see what this looks like, do it. It'll kind of it'll shift your mind right, it'll shift your mindset and it's cool, it's fun. We're gonna have vegetables in the garden and we get to do. For I never thought, yeah, I never thought I'd be doing this, but anyway, all right, so that is it. I hope that was helpful, I know it was helpful to me, and we are gonna keep unlearning together so that we can experience more freedom, and we will see you on Freedom Friday next week. Peace.

Thank you once again for listening to the Unlearned Podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time when we are able to unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, let's go.