Welcome to the Church of the Cross website and we encourage you to go from web to worshiping with us in person on Sunday Mornings at 9:30 am for the Traditional Service or The Encounter Worship Service at 12:00 pm.
We have a favorite saying here, “Welcome to Church of the Cross: it’s not our church its GOD’S church.” We are a group of believers who wish to follow God’s mission for us individually and as a Christian community. We do this through our relationship with Jesus Christ our Lord, that relationship being nurtured through prayer, word, worship and service together.
All are welcome to seek God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness and living presence at Church of the Cross. Come and see how the one true living Christ can renew your life, the life of your family, and heal the wounds we all get from life’s struggles.
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MY FATHER HAD A GARDEN
My father’s garden was a touchstone for all aspects of our new start as a young family of five in 1954. It was an interface for strengthening interpersonal family ties and an outdoor school in which many life lessons were learned. We had moved from a tenement apartment over a butcher shop by the Ohio River to a three-acre lot near Colerain. We were excited to be in the country. To our eyes our new home was spacious and safe. Even though in reality it was a humble 24 x 24 cinderblock structure on a concrete slab with a flat tar paper roof.
Beyond these block walls was what seemed like a never-ending expanse of green grass and trees and valleys and hills. At least it appeared so to three kids ages four, five and a half, and seven. The quarter acre directly behind the house was laid out by my father for his garden and grape arbor. At the age of 31 he had realized his own childhood dream of owning a piece of land and having an area to cultivate.
The garden was the usual collection of vegetable plants in good quantity and produced an abundance due to the diligent and continuous care each plant received. My sister Joanie was the most enthusiastic “helper” of the three of us children. Her motivation was first and foremost fueled by her adoration of our father and secondarily due to a curiosity of how such “miracles” occurred from seed to fruit. One of my earliest memories is watching Joan follow along behind my father’s slight frame as he planted corn in rows and she watered each mound with a small red tomato paste can, eagerly scurrying from a large bucket to the next mound. She tirelessly did her best to keep up, chattering away, talking to father about many and sundry things and announcing proudly when it was time to “move the bucket!”
His garden provided not only nourishing food for us all but also the life lessons of caning with mother and sharing our produce with our older neighbors. The abundance of that era of our lives was more than the food from that quarter-acre. It was and is still the watershed of character and the impact of love that as yet flows in the lives of Joanie and her two siblings.
Our heavenly Father asks to work in his garden. And, to do so for the same reasons: to grow in our spiritual life, to produce spiritual fruit and to share the abundance he gives us from so great a salvation.
Readà Matthew 21: 28-32
Pastor Tom