One More Season

In 2019, Detroit city officials tagged over 10,000 vacant lots for demolition. Among them was a crumbling property on Heidelberg Street that a retired schoolteacher named Martha Hayes had been watching from her porch for seven years. "Every spring I'd think, somebody ought to do something with that lot," she told a local reporter. Nobody ever did.

Then her church's urban ministry coordinator, James Whitfield, proposed something unexpected. Instead of lobbying for demolition, he asked the city for twelve months. His team hauled away debris, tested the soil, and planted a community garden. That first summer, the lot produced tomatoes, peppers, and collard greens for forty families. A space marked for destruction became a place of nourishment — but only because someone intervened and said, "Give it one more season."

This is the heart of what Jesus tells us in Luke 13. The owner of the vineyard has every right to cut down the barren fig tree. Three years without fruit is three years of wasted soil, wasted water, wasted patience. Justice says remove it. But the gardener kneels in the dirt and pleads for mercy — one more year to dig around the roots, to add fertilizer, to do the hard work of cultivation.

God is that gardener. He is digging around the hard places in your life right now, not because you deserve another season, but because His patience is an invitation to repentance. The question is whether this season of grace will finally bear fruit.