The Value of Jade

Where the first plant came from, I have no idea. I know only that I had a sturdy little jade plant in a red-painted pot. I'm reasonably good with plants. 

The plant thrived. It survived even the year that I was doing fieldwork my second year in divinity school, ten hours a week at a local church, and the plant developed some sort of weird white stuff I had to keep brushing off the leaves. It thrived so much that somewhere along the way, I divided it, twice, until I had three big sturdy jade plants on the windowsill of the screened porch of the home where we now live. 

Then I waited a little too late to bring the plants in for the winter. They were done. Even the jade. 

For several years, I've been looking for a jade plant, so I can start again. A week or so ago, a colleague was mentioning that she needed to thin or re-pot ... her jade plant. She graciously let me take home a cutting. I've rooted it in soil, which I've been keeping nicely damp. Approximately every day, I check it. Has it started putting down roots? Who knows. 

For probably three years, I've been searching for a jade plant. Every time I went to a plant nursery, a grocery store with plants for sale, even the drugstores where you can buy those little bamboo plants. Why did I see the jade plant in my colleague's office and get to bring home a cutting?

This colleague has invited me to share with her each workday one of the devotions with which I begin the day. The Moravian Church of North America publishes daily texts, both online and in a book. I live and work deep among the Moravians and thought it would add an ecumenical dimension to my readings; and I do find myself being brought deeper and closer in walking with those texts. 

It was while sharing the text for the day that I spotted the jade plant. The little cutting is in a bright pot on the screened porch because I've begun sharing the daily text with a colleague - a daily text that is easy to share because of how it's structured. Some of the other devotionals that feed my spirit are less so. They drill deep into my soul, but in a different way. 

For the church to survive, to thrive, to spread up and out like a jade plant, how much more nourishing is it when we allow ourselves to be fed by nearby growth from beliefs and ways that are rooted in the same soil?