It’s that time of year again where we’re getting the garden ready for planting. Therefore we’re spreading lots of compost on our beds. I’m always amazed at how different kitchen scraps, leaves, plants, twigs and so on can make the most amazing compost. I’m also surprised at how different items we put into the compost bin decompose at different speeds.

Working in the garden with the compost got me thinking about fear and hope. Fear paralyses us, motivates us, and often controls our lives. Hope appears to behave completely differently. And yet both grow. Hope often grows out of fear. So perhaps fear needs to decompose providing the nutrients hope needs to grow? And like different items decompose at different rates, perhaps this is true of fear too. Some of our fears take a long time to ‘die’ or loosen their grip on us.

And yet within our fear, hope grows. It provides a fertile ground for hope to grow. And when it does, just like we talk about the flowers not the compost, so do we talk about hope rather than fear it grew out of.

Photo by Edward Howell