The Garden Club

I am in the office at 11:44 p.m. No email service at home. Must blog! Must send output! Must type date entry! Must fight sleep! I just got back a few minutes ago from personnel and school board meetings in Cottonwood, Arizona. It was relaxing trip—there and back. I had a great time doing what I needed to do to get a teacher hired locally in order to take the name to Education Board next week for an official vote confirming their decision. I have one more meeting Thursday night to complete the list of teachers being rehired for next school year.

I also got a chance to bring the Verde Valley School Board up to date on the shift to more teacher accountability through more official observations and evaluations—something that has been sorely lacking in the past. They were delighted to hear that teachers were going to be evaluated. This seems to be a recurring theme across the conference. While chairing the committee I got to know a couple of new people on the school board in Cottonwood. However, that is not what made my evening most memorable. That distinction is reserved for the Gardening Club of Cottonwood.

I arrived about an hour early to my meeting. This is obviously better than arriving an hour late. Nonetheless, since I was there so early I wandered into the church multipurpose room, which was open. There I met Sharon and Valerie, two friendly and enthusiastic members of what I discovered was a club that meets once a month on Tuesday evening in the fellowship hall of the church. I introduced myself as Ruben. They asked if I had come to the Garden Club and I said no. They asked me why I was there to which I responded that I was there to meet with the Verde Valley School Board. Somehow it did not register that I was a church official, even after I told them I was the Superintendent of Education for the church school system in Arizona.

I know they did not grasp my connection to the church because they proceeded to try to convince me of the superiority of their vegetarian diet, including tofu cheesecake, to whatever meat-based diet I was presently adhering to. I politely asked questions which they were delighted to answer beyond my expectations. They told me about the Garden Club and the class that would be taking place in the hall in a few minutes.

I helped them set up chairs for about 50 people. They kept trying to “convert me” to gardening and to a vegetarian diet. I did not let on that I was a lapsed vegetarian, or a pastor, for that matter. I was enjoying the conversion experience too much. Suddenly the members of the Cottonwood Garden Club began to arrive. Quickly I was surrounded by a very colorful array of people with friendly dispositions and quick invitations to join their movement. What movement you ask? Well, obviously the movement to prepare for the day the New World Order comes marching down our streets trying to occupy our secret underground bunkers built in preparation for the inevitable invasion from outer space, of course!

I had never been surrounded by such a unique contingent of doomsday-preaching, conspiracy-laced, garden-variety raw organic food consumer evangelists in all my life! I even met a lady who claimed to be a radio personality in the late night radio world. Her business card stated her name as Aurora Light! She was into “aeroponics,” or farming without soil. She wanted to connect with people who would like to establish a collective of aeroponic famers, to counteract the government plan to control our minds through Monsanto chemicals by producing their own crops on private land in preparation for “The Landing.”

I was left wondering what our hope in a soon coming Savior in the clouds sounds like to people who don’t understand what we are talking about. Does it just sound too strange to make it believable? What would cause them to share in our conviction? I was lost in a group of believers in a parallel worldview and I wanted no part of it. There has to be more to what we believe than what we expect in the future, as essential as that is. What is it about our life that draws people to want to share in our experience? “We have not believed in fancifully contrived fables,” is the way the Apostle Paul worded it. Food for thought….