Healing Written in the Soil
Reclaiming God’s Design for Body, Mind and Spirit
By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
Cultivation was God’s first command: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Before there were systems, medicine, or programs, God placed humanity in a garden and told us to work it and keep it. That design held body, mind, spirit, and provision together in one rhythm. It was preventative by nature, a daily practice that built resilience into life itself: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food’” (Genesis 1:28–29). Over time we replaced this simple pattern with layers of fixes that only touch symptoms. We began to treat body, mind, and spirit as if they were separate, pulling food away from movement and reducing faith to ideas while reducing health to numbers. What was once seamless became fragmented. In chasing quick remedies, we traded away slow and sustaining patterns that reach the root. As a result, we have learned to accept survival on medication—enduring side effects that keep us dependent—instead of living wholly and thriving. Yet Jesus promises more in John 10:10: “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly!” This was not only a promise of the future but of restoration now—life restored to the original abundance of cultivating the earth, bringing order to chaos, and living in the rhythms He set long before America was a nation.
Today, our nation spends trillions trying to patch problems that resist healing, building profitable industries around management instead of restoration. This drift from cultivation to reaction is not just economic but cultural, shaping how we see ourselves and how we measure health.
We spend $4.9 trillion every year on health care in the United States (CDC). About ninety percent of that goes to chronic conditions and mental health.
Heart disease and stroke take more than 944,800 lives each year—over one in three deaths. These conditions alone cost hundreds of billions in care and lost work. More than 38 million Americans live with diabetes, and another 98 million have prediabetes. Together, diabetes costs more than $400 billion annually.
Obesity affects 20% of children and 42% of adults, adding over $170 billion every year. Cavities affect one in six children and one in four adults, costing tens of billions in lost productivity and school hours. Physical inactivity adds another $117 billion annually.
Beyond this, Americans spend nearly $38 billion on gyms, while therapy and counseling together exceed $280 billion.
I share these numbers not to create distraction or busyness, but simply to present them as they are—staggering realities of where our resources flow. They stand in stark contrast to the free and embodied medicine found in cultivation in the garden.
Why are we comfortable with these figures? Why do we accept this spending as normal while ignoring prevention? This same misalignment shows up in our land as well. Across Texas, thousands of acres of church property sit unused. In San Antonio alone, surveys found more than 3,000 acres of underused church-owned land (NCRegister). Just as money is spent managing symptoms instead of restoring health, so land lies dormant instead of being cultivated. At St. Paul’s, our first location, we use about 13,000 square feet—less than a third of an acre—and yet lives are being transformed. It mirrors God’s way of multiplying the few into abundance, like the loaves and fish in John 6:9–13. Gardening itself is a picture of abundance by nature—seeds multiplying into harvest, small spaces feeding many. Imagine if even a fraction of the unused land across Texas shifted from lying fallow to feeding life. The opportunity is not only in the soil but in our mindset: moving from reactive spending to proactive stewardship.
For the first twenty years my gardening was output-driven—always calculating input versus output—focused on yield but blind to what my body and spirit were truly gaining. That season was about production. Since starting The Neighborhood Garden Project, the focus has shifted. Margin has been created to help reestablish healthy rhythms for everyone involved. These past three years of cultivating myself alongside faithful community members and our organizational team have carried a different quality: life lived at a slower pace, rooted in shared work, with new rhythms that are quietly healing people under the radar. I often tell people, I’ve been cultured by the garden, and now I see the contrast between striving for output and living within sustaining rhythms. Today at Emmanuel, our second garden site, I spent 2 hours mowing and weed-eating. Over that time, I took 5,578 steps. My body burned 1,858 calories in that single session, with my heart rate averaging 144 beats per minute and peaking at 165, the kind of vigorous intensity you’d expect from jogging or climbing stairs. By the end of the day today, the totals were even more striking: 4,984 calories burned, 14,976 steps logged—the equivalent of 6.2 miles walked—and 295 active zone minutes (a Fitbit measure of time spent with your heart rate in fat-burn, cardio, or peak zones), nearly double the entire week’s CDC-recommended amount of cardiovascular activity condensed into a single day. The truth was undeniable: cultivation in the garden is medicine. These stats reflect my full-time gardening work, but even for those who work sedentary jobs, one hour a week in rhythmic garden patterns can begin to shift health in every compartment of life—and maybe even help us live as one integrated whole.
We often fixate on outcomes or quick relief, overlooking the glory in the simple. In the garden, we learn to listen to the body—when to rest, when to work. That awareness grows from identity, and from walking in it. Cultivation becomes medicine. It strengthens the body, steadies the mind, regulates the heart, flushes out toxins, and sets rhythms of rest. What our healthcare system tries to replicate through gyms, prescriptions, therapies, and clinics is already present in the garden.
The science confirms what the garden teaches. In other words, modern research echoes ancient wisdom. Diabetes worsens with sedentary living, while gardening improves insulin sensitivity and lowers glucose. Stress unchecked harms mental health, while gardening elevates serotonin and dopamine, lowers cortisol, and decreases anxiety and depression. Studies show green spaces improve focus, reduce blood pressure, and strengthen well-being. Soil microbes like Mycobacterium vaccae boost serotonin and mood regulation. Cultivation of fruits and vegetables increases access to fresh produce, strengthens food systems, and improves diets. Hydration paired with sweat supports kidney health and cellular repair. Outdoor labor builds cardiovascular resilience by strengthening the heart, improving circulation, and lowering blood pressure through sustained natural movement. Decline slows when we return to working the soil. Too often, greed has replaced time, yet it is shared work and presence that reach the root of healing. Ancient wisdom and modern science agree: garden rhythms protect long-term health—boosting immunity, strengthening mental health, and reconnecting people to food and creation. At The Neighborhood Garden Project, we embody this truth by walking with people as long as they are willing, cultivating side by side until they cross into transformation and begin cultivating others themselves.
What our society treats as separate—diabetes, mental health, maternal health, food insecurity—was designed to be integrated in the soil of daily life. Cultivation restores that integration. It ties the physical to the spiritual, the emotional to the practical. It forces us to slow down, to move, to sweat, to nourish, to rest. It brings back the preventative design systems cannot reproduce. We spend billions patching symptoms because we overlook God’s first gift. But the evidence is in the soil, and in our own bodies.
The contrast is clear. We can keep pouring trillions into temporary solutions, or we can recover the design given in the beginning. Healing is not hidden. It is written into the ground beneath our feet. And the shift does not have to start massively. It begins with one seed planted, one bed turned, one garden built at a time. This is what we are stewarding at TNGP—small beginnings that God multiplies into abundance. Just as the loaves and fish were multiplied, so too can the small acts of cultivation ripple outward—restoring health, community, and hope.
