The Garden on Maple Street

For fifteen years, Ruth Halloran poured herself into the community garden on Maple Street in southeast Portland. She hauled in twelve tons of composted soil to replace the hardpan clay. She built raised beds from reclaimed cedar, installed drip irrigation with her own retirement savings, and spent whole Saturdays pulling bindweed by hand so the roots wouldn't strangle the tomatoes. She organized seed swaps, taught neighborhood kids how to thin carrots, and left hand-written notes of encouragement on each plot marker every spring.

By 2023, the garden had forty-two plots — and thirty-six of them grew nothing but complaints. Renters fought over water schedules. Someone dumped construction debris in the herb spiral. Plot holders who hadn't shown up since May demanded harvest shares in September. When Ruth walked through the gate one October morning and found her prized heirloom roses torn out to make room for a storage unit nobody had approved, she sat on the bench and wept.

She had held nothing back. And the garden gave back thorns.

Isaiah tells us God did the same with Israel — cleared the stones, planted the choicest vines, built a watchtower, even carved a winepress in anticipation of a harvest that never came. He looked for justice and found bloodshed, listened for righteousness and heard only cries of distress. The heartbreak in this passage is not the anger of a landlord but the grief of a Gardener who gave everything and received nothing in return.