When the Corn Bends, Our Peace Stands

By Josh Singleton | Founder, The Neighborhood Garden Project

A storm rolled through overnight. The next morning, I got a message from the rector at our second garden site. He said the corn had been knocked down by the wind. Just the day before, the rows were standing tall. Now they were flattened. I hadn’t even seen it in person yet—but the photo and the message said enough.

But here’s the thing: the corn may have been hit, but our peace wasn’t.

What that storm showed me is something we talk about a lot—that our peace doesn’t come from what we grow. It comes from who gave it. And since God gives peace, no storm can take it.

That’s why we leave margin in our garden—on purpose. We’re not measuring success by how perfect the plants look or how much we harvest. If we did that, every bug, every drought, and every strong wind would feel like a loss. But that’s not how we operate. If our worth was in the corn, we’d panic every time something touched it. But our value isn’t tied to crops—it’s tied to people. It’s tied to presence. And presence can’t be flattened.

Storms don’t ruin our work. They reveal it.

Yes, the corn got bent. But it can be stood back up. And more importantly, what’s truly rooted deep in the soil and in us didn’t move.

Nature’s always preaching. Tomatoes will split. Beds will shift. Plants will break. But the real work is what’s happening in people—what’s being built under the surface. That’s the stuff storms can’t take. That’s what we’re here for.

The garden isn’t the prize. It’s the tool. It’s the setting for something much bigger to happen. So when things get messy, we don’t panic. We don’t try to cover it up. We remember why we started. We stay grounded. We show back up.

Because we’re not just growing food. We’re growing people who know what real peace looks like—people who know how to stay steady when life pushes hard.

So let’s remember this: the fruit that really matters has never been the harvest. It’s the formation. And when storms come again—and they will—they’ll find us the same way they did this time: steady, settled, and not shaken. Because the peace we carry isn’t in the plants. It’s in us. And it came from God.