107 | The Garden I Came From: What Romania Taught Me About a God Whose Faithfulness Crosses Every Border
She's home. After a month of episodes recorded before she left, Sanda is back in Texas — and back at the microphone in real time. This is the "full report" she kept promising you from Romania: what the soil that made her actually looked like after twenty-one years away, and what her own wild, overgrown garden taught her the week she got home.
For a whole month, every episode ended the same way — when I'm back, I'll bring you the full report. Today she makes good on it.
Sanda grew up watching her parents garden not for pleasure but for survival — long, hard hours in Romanian soil she once resented and later understood had made her a gardener for life. Twenty-one years and an ocean later, she stood in that country again. In the market: fruit and vegetables still warm from the field, and a flavor she'd almost forgotten was possible — that's what a tomato is supposed to taste like.
Then she went to the actual home — the house and garden of her childhood in a small town in western Romania. She didn't need a map; her body knew every street. The house belongs to another family now, remodeled and reshaped for a new generation. But under the terrace, protected from thirty-five years of weather, the chalk drawings she and her sisters made as girls were still there — kept, like little cave paintings, waiting for her to come back and find them. The old grapevine was replaced but still throwing down the same green shade. The strawberry patch was gone. The garden was smaller now — half orchard, half kitchen garden, no longer driven for a family's income — and the rested soil still gave rich, abundant food. And the dirt: dark, deep, fertile unamended, full of everything she spends years trying to add to her Texas ground. She wanted to fill her suitcase with it. Best of all, her children walked it with her, receiving the puzzle pieces of where their mother came from — melancholy and joy braided together too tightly to pull apart. She brought home real Romanian paprika and a small handful of flat wax bean seeds, to plant the garden she came from inside the garden she's made.
Then she came home — to a garden gone feral while she was gone. Spent tomatoes she pulled, a few she cut down deep to a stub that are already budding back out, peppers that came alive the moment the tomatoes cleared, and a tromboncino that had swallowed half the bed and had to be cut to almost nothing. On her knees in the Texas heat, sorting the tangle, the whole thing came together: what she saw across the ocean and what she saw in her own dirt were the same lesson. His faithfulness does not stop at any border you will ever cross.
Through Acts 17, Psalm 139, Genesis 8, and Psalm 145, this is a conversation for every woman living with one foot in two worlds — two countries, two seasons, or two versions of herself — who has quietly wondered whether she left part of God behind when she left home.
In this episode:
* Why "seedtime and harvest shall not cease" is a promise made to the whole earth, not one country — Genesis 8:22 and Psalm 24:1, and how the God who fed you in the season you came from is not a smaller God now that you've moved on
* "If I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will hold me fast" — Psalm 139:7–10, and the tender truth that you never traveled one step of your life outside His grip
* Transplant shock, and the God who holds the root through the part that feels most like dying — why He guided and held you fast through every move, even when you couldn't feel it
* "He marked out the boundaries of their lands… so that they would seek him and find him — though he is not far from any one of us" — Acts 17:26–27, and why every border you've crossed was arranged to send you reaching
* The dark, rich dirt she couldn't carry home in a suitcase — and why she didn't need to, because the God who made that soil fertile is the same One tending the stubborn ground you're standing in now
* Why your overgrown, neglected garden kept growing while you were away — "God gives the growth" — and the freedom of knowing the keeping of your life doesn't rest on your constant grip
* Three formation practices: find the same soil, carry a seed home, and tend the wild that grew while you were away
A breath prayer to carry with you: If I settle on the far side of the sea… even there, Your hand holds me.
Take your next step:
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🌱 Standing in a season of re-entry — back from something, worn out, facing an overgrown life you don't know where to start with? Rooted Reset is a five-day, mostly quiet email journey to help you interrupt the urgency and let your own soul be tended, one small step at a time. Also at rootedingrace.me.
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If this episode found a two-worlds place in you, would you leave a rating and review? It's the simplest way to help another woman find this little garden gate — and it means more than you know.
And I'd love to hear from you: what season or place have you wondered whether you left part of God behind in — and where have you seen His same faithfulness meet you in the new soil? Leave a comment, share this with a friend who's living between two worlds, or simply reply and tell me where you are. I read every one.
Until then — stay rooted, and grow with grace. 🌿
