Planting Tomatoes in a Place You Didn't Choose

When Toyota closed its assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 2020 for pandemic retooling, hundreds of temporary workers found themselves relocated to a facility in San Antonio, Texas. Most assumed they'd be back in months. Maria Cortez, a line supervisor from Lexington, packed one suitcase and told her daughter she'd be home by summer.

Summer came and went. Then fall. Maria could have spent every evening in her cramped apartment, scrolling job boards back home, counting the days. Instead, she joined a neighborhood cleanup crew on Guadalupe Street. She started tutoring ESL students at the public library on Thursday nights. She planted tomatoes in a community garden plot, even though she told herself she wasn't staying. By the time the Kentucky plant reopened fourteen months later, the neighbors threw her a going-away party. The ESL students wrote her thank-you cards in English — their first confident sentences.

"I went there angry," Maria later told a reporter. "I came home grateful. That place changed me more than I changed it."

The exiles in Babylon didn't choose their ZIP code. Neither did Maria. But God, through the prophet Jeremiah, gave His people a strange and counterintuitive command: build houses, plant gardens, seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you. Not because Babylon was home, but because faithfulness doesn't wait for favorable circumstances. The Almighty does some of His deepest work in us precisely in the places we never planned to be.