I Come to the Garden Alone
And that's probably for the best...
No essay today, just a walk and a conversation I had with the love of my life. The title for this essay is the mood in which I recommend it to be read.
This early 19th Century Hymn written by C. Austen Miles was written in the voice of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden. It was a surprisingly long time from it being written and played at Billy Sunday gospel rallies until it was recorded by a woman (Rosemary Clooney in 1959). I’m fond of the version Doris Day recorded in 1962 as it sounds like a proper love song as was intended.
I Come to the Garden Alone
And that's probably for the best…
This morning, my wife Sonya and I were walking through Gosford Forest Park. As is our custom, we used the time to talk, dream up wild schemes, and laugh—mostly at ourselves.
Today, Sonya had us on the topic of Church. Long-time readers will know that, because of the wild nature of her faith, Sonya rarely speaks meta-narratively about Church. But—as she later admitted—she made an exception for my sake: to get my mind off my stomach and because she knows it’s one of my favourite topics. In short, it was a treat.
Sonya began with the kind of pronouncement that makes me put my phone away and pay attention: when she walks in these woods, she feels as though God is walking with her—like whatever was experienced in Eden.
Excited by the promise of what I knew would be an invigorating conversation, I swallowed a joke about feeling flattered by the compliment. I smiled, stayed silent, and let her continue.
She started comparing that feeling—of walking with God in the forest—with worship in a church building. We have a mutual friend Tish, an older lady who always tells us ‘my Church is at the top of my garden,’ and that thought lives rent free in our minds. After referencing this, Sonya said she couldn’t imagine worshiping in nature the way people often do in church. I offered a small interjection: maybe our worship is shaped by the atmosphere around us—worship formed within four walls will look very different than worship shaped by the trees, the wind, and open sky.
We pontificated on it for a while—what it might look like to worship in nature. As I tried to follow her stream of consciousness, I hit a familiar rock: interpersonal relationships. I made a passing attempt to steer us toward how we relate to pastors, but she gently guided the conversation back.
“It’s not about interpersonal relationships, I don’t think.”
“What then—environment?”
She nodded and began making some bold claims, the kind you can only make when you’ve lived them. Walking in nature, she said, had been a kind of antidote to her depression. “If I had a church,” she said, “I’d advise everyone to go take a walk.”
The idea was clear: if we meet God among trees five times taller than us, and feel God’s presence in that expanse, then we are drawn out of ourselves just enough to honestly examine what we’re really feeling. And from that place—of quiet, of scale, of presence—we might actually be able to see clearly what to do next.
Sonya began talking about her fears—how things that might have crippled her for months now only take a few days to shake loose. She tied it to a trial we’re currently walking through and the handful of nights we’ve both spent tossing and turning.
We used to think we had to stay in the middle of it all until we “fixed it”—as though panic were a posture of responsibility. But more and more, we’re discovering the opposite. It’s usually when we give it up—when we go for a walk, let the trees remind us that we are small and loved—that clarity begins to return.
Or maybe not even clarity, but permission to stop panicking long enough to breathe. To have a little faith. To let the problem simmer quietly in the background while life, like a stream, finds its way around the stone.
The conversation meandered after that—as conversations do when they’re given room to breathe. We circled back a little to church again, to the idea that gathering in a building week after week tends to shape our assumptions about how God wants us to meet: same place, same people, same format, same tone—unchanging, regardless of the person or the season.
Sonya contrasted that with something more alive, more fluid—something you find outdoors. Church as something you stumble into rather than build. Maybe it’s just one person you meet on the path that day. Maybe no one. Maybe the wordless company of the trees is enough. But if there is a person, it’s not about taking them into the woods to “murder them with the gospel”—as Sonya so eloquently put it. Not to corner them, trap them, or talk at them until they nod politely and escape as quickly as possible.
Because when that happens, the disservice has already been done—not just to the person, but to the gospel of nature. The gospel that waits patiently in the wind, that whispers instead of shouts, that meets people in their own time. The gospel that does not force itself, but invites.
After that, we began to reminisce.
We thought back to the unexpected people God brought across our path—not when we were trying to serve God, but when we’d almost forgotten we were supposed to. A homeless man. A lonely old woman. A baby and toddler group. None of it looked like ministry at the time. None of it fit into a programme or had a clear goal. A church with four walls might have labelled each one a “ministry opportunity”—pinned it to a noticeboard, given it a catchy name, and sought to solve the problem.
But we didn’t solve anything. We just lived alongside the problem. Slowly. Quietly. Often without seeing any change at all.
We spoke of how the people of God are transient. Fluid. Hard to pin down. They appear and disappear like strangers on the road to Emmaus. And if there’s any advice that keeps repeating in those moments, it’s usually not a strategic plan or a growth model. It’s something much simpler. Something that sounds like: mind your own business and take care of what’s been given to you.
We prize someone like Mother Teresa for taking care of so many—the poor, the dying, the forgotten—but somehow in our admiration we skip over the instruction. We want her scope, but not her simplicity. We dream of saving thousands, and neglect the one we were actually called to love.
Maybe this is what it means to be surprised—to find out we did serve Christ, or to find out we didn’t. It’s rarely what we thought at the time.
We weren’t always at our best. Sometimes we were barely holding on. But in the mystery of some of the hardest seasons of our life, we made ourselves present—to others who were worse off, or just as worn down. And somehow, in that shared poverty, God was served.
We didn’t know it then. We weren’t acting with the gospel at the forefront of our minds, weren’t thinking in terms of obedience or reward or virtue. Sometimes we were just trying to be human. Just trying to keep breathing. Just trying to be kind.
But now, looking back, it’s clearer. We were not far from the kingdom in those moments. Maybe it is only in those moments—when you forget yourself long enough to really see someone else—that you unknowingly meet Christ. Not in your certainty, but in your weakness. Not when you had the plan, but when you had nothing left but presence.
In those times, we let our pain lead us to others in pain. We didn’t wait to be healed before showing up. And strangely, it was in tending to their wounds that we found salve for our own. Not always complete healing, not always clarity—but enough grace to get through the day—our daily bread.
So this summer, with a hard season ahead, we’ve made a kind of plan—though it doesn’t look like a plan at all. We’re going to face our difficulty by facing someone else’s. Not to escape our own troubles, not to distract ourselves, but because we’ve learned this: when we walk with another in their pain, we’re not alone in ours.
It’s not a strategy so much as a seed of faith—a quiet trust that God tends to all fields at once. That in losing ourselves, we are found. That love still heals, even when we are the ones bleeding.