After Easter—Spring and Summer in the Garden! Wondering what to do with kids and adults in Ordinary time? Go outside!!! Our Christian Education team invited adults’ and children’s classes to come out to the Sweetwater Garden behind our church to make a Peace Garden. This garden is part of the Wylde Center neighborhood gardens. We enlisted folks who could help us but were not the usual teachers: a person who volunteered in the garden, another to build benches out of recycled wood, an artist to help paint the benches and the peace pole we erected as well as a bird bath that we decorated with mosaic tiles.

Master gardeners picked out flowers for the youngest ones to plant and various folks who had special interests came to help. One member, who worked for the Center for Disease Control (CDC)  and was leading a project in Kenya to plant sweet potatoes, helped us plant some in an old grocery cart!.

Each week we began with a movement prayer a Psalm or music (Don’t Just Sit There by Leedell Stickler). Children read scriptures out loud with their parents or we participated in acting out a story from the Bible. The garden had a strawberry patch so we heard the Cherokee story of how the strawberry got its name (The First Strawberries by Joseph Bruchac). The children planted a fig tree and sunflowers which were measured each week. Don’t have a garden—make a place and start your own Peace Garden—it was so wonderful to be outside in God’s New Creation!!

Here are some further suggestions if you want to try this yourself: Leach Peace Garden Suggestions

Caroline Leach, Oakhurst Presbyterian Church