When Grace Outruns the Garden
If Jesus Raced Bikes, It Would Be Cyclocross
Every Thursday during the fall, my kids and I head to the town compost center. It’s not where most people look for a spiritual epiphany. It smells of decay—the heavy, sweet-sour scent of rotting leaves and organic waste. It is loud with the mechanical scream of squealing disc brakes and the rhythmic crunch-crunch of tires on loose gravel. My kids and I are there to race cyclocross, our heart rates spiking into the red as we navigate the mud and the hills.
This is the place where the town dumps what it no longer wants. It is a landscape of the discarded.
Yet, in the middle of this utilitarian wasteland sits a fenced-in community garden. It is a neat rectangle of order, where people grow prize tomatoes and heirloom kale in straight, weeded rows. It represents the “ideal”—the way things are supposed to look when they are managed, manicured, and protected.
But I’ve learned something about fences lately: they are mostly a suggestion.
The Great Escape
At home, I keep goats. If you’ve ever owned goats, you know that a fence is not a barrier to them; it is a puzzle. We routinely check the fences to make sure that the pen is secure. I wanted them in the “safe” zone.
An hour later, I was sitting in my kitchen when I heard a familiar thump-scrape on the floorboards of the back porch. I looked up to see one of my goats staring at me through the window, looking immensely proud of Himself. He had wiggled a single board loose—just enough to squeeze his ribcage through—and decided that the back porch offered much better prospects than the designated pasture.
He didn’t want to be where he was “supposed” to be. he wanted to be where the action was. And he brought the others along with him!
It’s the same at the compost center. The most beautiful thing there isn’t inside that community garden fence. It’s the mint. At some point, the mint wiggled its own metaphorical board loose. It escaped the confines of the garden and migrated into the wild, overlooked patches right in the middle of our racecourse.
As we race—churning through the muck and sliding over slick roots—our tires crush the leaves of the escaped mint. Suddenly, the smell of decay is replaced by an incredible, sharp fragrance. The harder the ride, the more we struggle, the stronger the scent becomes.
The Geography of the Outcast
I think we often view the Bible as a community garden—a place of neat rows and high fences where everything is “orderly.” But when you actually read the text, you realize that Jesus is almost always on the back porch or in the compost pile. He is rarely interested in the view from inside the garden fence.
He spent his time in the places where society dumped the people it no longer wanted to deal with.
Take the Gerasene man. He was the ultimate “discarded” person, living among the tombs because the “polite” society of the city couldn’t contain his trauma or his demons. He was loud, he was naked, and he was terrifying. If Jesus followed our modern church growth models, he might have sent a committee to the graveyard to invite the man to a “Newcomers’ Brunch” at the local synagogue—provided he put on a suit and lowered his voice.
But Jesus doesn’t ask for a meeting in a sanitized space. He doesn’t drag the man into the temple and tell him to conform to the liturgy. He crosses a stormy sea, steps into the mud of the graveyard, and meets him in the thick of the decay.
Grace Beyond the Perimeter
We see this “escaped grace” everywhere in the Gospels. We see it with the woman with the issue of blood. For twelve years, she was legally “fenced out” of every sacred space. She was a walking “compost center”—unclean, untouchable, and unwanted.
She didn’t find grace in a sanctuary behind a heavy curtain. She found it in a crushing, dusty crowd. She was the “mint” that had escaped the garden of the religious elite. When she reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’s garment, she wasn’t asking for permission to enter the temple. She was claiming the fact that the Kingdom of God had moved into the street.
Then there is Hagar. She wasn’t just an outcast; she was an Egyptian slave cast out into the desert to die by the “righteous” family of Abraham. She was literally dumped. And yet, it was in the wilderness—the place of abandonment—where she became the first person in the Bible to give God a name: El Roi, “The God who sees me.”
God didn’t wait for Hagar to find her way back to the tent; God met her in the sand.
Social Justice and the “Escaped” Life
In our modern context, we often mistake social justice for a kind of “charitable invitation.” We think we are doing the work if we make our “gardens” (our churches and nonprofits) more welcoming to the marginalized.
But true social justice, in the way of Jesus, isn’t about inviting the outcast to come and conform to our garden rules. It isn’t about teaching people how to act like they aren’t in the weeds. It is about us realizing that the Spirit has already wiggled a board loose and moved outside the fence.
The Woman at the Well didn’t need a map to the Temple in Jerusalem. She needed a man who was willing to sit on the edge of a well in the heat of the day—a place of labor and social tension—and talk to her as an equal. Jesus didn’t start the conversation with a list of moral requirements. He started with a request for water. He met her in the middle of her “compost” life, showing us that living water bubbles up in the places we’ve been taught to avoid.
The Fragrance of the Crushed
The most profound lesson from the cyclocross track is that the mint only releases its fragrance when it is stepped on or ridden over.
There is a specific kind of “grace in the weeds” that you simply cannot find in a climate-controlled sanctuary. It is the grace found in the struggle for justice, in the solidarity with the broken, and in the messy reality of lives that don’t fit into neat theological boxes.
When we engage in the work of justice—when we stand with the unhoused, when we advocate for the prisoner, when we sit with the grieving—it feels like a cyclocross race. It is loud, it is exhausting, and it is often muddy. People might look at the “compost” of the situation and turn away. But for those of us with our tires in the dirt, we know that’s where the mint is. That’s where the fragrance is the strongest.
Getting Our Tires Dirty
As we look at the “outcasts” of our own neighborhoods, we have to ask ourselves: Are we trying to build a better fence, or are we willing to get our tires muddy?
Jesus didn’t come to establish a better garden club. He came to be the “escaped mint.” He was crushed by the systems of his day so that his fragrance could fill the entire world. Not just the holy places, but the graveyards, the wells, and the compost centers of our lives.
The next time you feel like you’re in the weeds—or the next time you see a “goat” on your back porch that doesn’t belong there—don’t be so quick to herd them back behind the fence. Maybe they aren’t lost. Maybe they’ve just realized that the best parts of the Kingdom are usually found on the outside.
Breathing in the scent of the crushed mint, I’m starting to think the weeds are exactly where we were meant to be all along.
The Garden Notes
📚 On the Nightstand
Gerald May’s “The Dark Night of the Soul” translates John of the Cross out of 16th-century mystical theology and into the language of a psychiatrist who spent decades sitting with people in spiritual and psychological unraveling — which makes it unusually well-suited for deconstructing readers carrying trauma, doubt, and depression alongside the faith questions. May is honest about what John left implicit: the dark night is messy, often indistinguishable from clinical depression from the inside, and rarely feels like progress while you’re in it. If you want a companion for the road rather than the source text itself, start here.
🌿 From the Shop
If you want to look at the soil of your heart, I wrote ‘Seeds Weeds and Soul Soil’ with you in mind. Available for free for Kindle Unlimited.
Quote of the Week
"The Kingdom of Heaven is not a manicured lawn; it is the wild, resilient mint that thrives in the compost. If you want to find the fragrance of Grace, you have to be willing to get some mud on your tires." — Grace in the Weeds
The Greenhouse Preview
If Tuesday’s article, “If Jesus Raced Bikes, It Would Be Cyclocross,” felt like a deep breath of permission to finally leave the “proper” garden behind, then Friday’s Greenhouse is where we move from the “why” to the “how.”
We’ve talked about the “escaped mint” of grace, but how do we actually train our senses to find it when life feels more like a compost pile than a sanctuary?
For my paid subscribers, I’m opening up the Friday Greenhouse, where we’ll be building a “Portable Sanctuary”—including:
The 3-Minute Liturgy for the Weeds: A prayer designed specifically for your kitchen counter, the carpool line, or the local dump—no pews or leaders required.
The Fence-Breaker Journaling Prompts: Five deep-dive questions to help you map out the “thin places” in your own neighborhood where the Spirit has wiggled a board loose.
The Monthly Field Guide: A workbook released each month based on the previous month’s articles and liturgies.
Upgrade to the paid tier to join the lab, join the conversation, and get your survival kit for the weekend. Let’s go find the grace in the weeds together.
The Closing Question
Where have you smelled the 'crushed mint' this week? Is there a place in your life that currently feels like a compost center, yet somehow, grace is starting to grow there anyway? I’d love to hear about your view from the weeds in the comments.
P.S. Streams of Grace has launched!
This past week, Streams of Grace launched! This online community focuses on being a ‘sanctuary without walls’ for the church-less or anyone who struggles with attending a physical church space. Streams of Grace is an asynchronous community - pop in anytime, anywhere, and join the conversation. Sign up here!