Teeming With Life Again
Learning Your Realm So Creation Can Breathe Around You
By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
Returning to Genesis order looks like this: learn your realm, work within it, and receive the blessing attached to it. Multiplication follows placement, not striving. When your calling flows from design and your activity from peace, the world around you begins to teem with life again.
I see this every week in the garden.
At our first garden site in Katy, there was a back portion of the property that was never going to have garden plots, but it was still under our care. It sat behind the main garden, close enough to mow, far enough to forget. This was a space we continued to mow routinely and mindlessly, just another pass of the mower to keep things looking tidy. It was accepted as a place that just gets mowed. Not much more thought was given. Grass grew just high enough to be a nuisance, then the blades would come through and flatten it back down. The soil stayed hard. The space felt empty, even when it was green. People walked by it without seeing it. It was technically on the property, but it did not belong to anyone in particular. It was land without a realm.
Then, slowly, we began to pay attention.
We stopped asking, “What can we make this become?” and started asking, “What was this made to be?” Instead of forcing garden plots into every open space, we recognized that this green space did not want rows. It wanted prairie. It wanted to host grasses and wildflowers, insects and birds and hidden life.
So we stepped into a different posture. We listened. We planted native seed. We stopped mowing every inch. We let the soil breathe. We learned the realm. We worked within it.
Now, when you look at that same green space, it is alive. Coreopsis leans over the edge of the prairie, inviting people to come closer. Bees move from flower to flower. Spiders stretch their webs between seed stalks. What used to be a flat piece of ground now hums. It teems with life.
The life did not show up because we tried harder. It appeared because we agreed with what the land already carried. We came into alignment with its design.
This is how God set up the world in Genesis.
God did not scatter everything at random and hope for the best. He formed realms. Light and darkness. Sky and water. Land and vegetation. Each realm had a purpose. Each realm had creatures that belonged there. Birds were made for the sky. Fish were made for the water. Livestock, creeping things, and wild animals were made for the land. Scripture repeats, “according to their kinds,” because the right life belongs in the right place.
Then God places humans into their realm. Not floating in the clouds. Not scattered on some anonymous hillside. Planted in a specific garden. Given a clear assignment. “Work it and keep it.” Their authority is not vague. It is connected to a place, to a design, to a way of being with God.
I have said yes to this rhythm. I am all in on the life God has given me, learning to live in a Genesis rhythm as best I can. Soil, Scripture, family, the garden. That is my realm.
But most people around us are not thinking in those terms. Many do not even believe this kind of life with God is possible. No one ever told them that God created realms. No one ever showed them that calling is tied to placement. When they hear it, it can feel strange and hard to digest, easier to shrug it off than to sit with what it might mean for their own lives. Treating it as unrealistic becomes a quiet way to excuse themselves from uncovering their own realm.
So most of the time, people are simply doing what they have been trained to do. Get through the week. Pay the bills. Respond to emails. Try not to fall apart.
So what happens when you do not know your realm?
In the garden, misalignment is easy to see. Plant a sun loving crop in deep shade and it will stretch and strain, but it will never really thrive. Put prairie grasses in a shallow garden bed and they will outgrow the space and fall over. Sow wildflower seed on compacted ground and rain will wash it away. Nothing is wrong with the seed. It is just in the wrong place.
Human lives can look the same.
When you do not know your realm, you live stretched and strained. You stay busy, but not fruitful. You wake up tired, even when you sleep. Your weeks are packed, but your heart feels thin. You feel guilty for not being everywhere at once. You say yes when you mean no. You feel some kind of ache, but you do not have language for it, so you call it stress and keep moving.
From the outside, it can look fine. You may even look successful. Inside, it feels like trying to grow roots in concrete.
Most of the people who come through the garden are not lazy or uncaring. They are faithful. They are trying. But they have been formed by a story that says, “Do more. Carry more. Fix more.” It is pressure, not presence. It is motion, not alignment.
In that story, the idea of realm almost sounds selfish. Staying within an assignment feels like not doing enough. Rest feels like compromise. Saying no feels like failure.
So people live scattered. Their bodies are in one place. Their minds are in three others. They feel responsible for everything and at home in almost nothing.
When you do not know your realm, this is what is at stake.
You.
You are at stake. The person God created you to be. The joy you were meant to carry. The peace that could have lived in your body and mind. Misalignment steals that. It replaces it with chronic low level anxiety and a constant sense that you are behind, even if you do not know what you are chasing.
The people you were meant to walk with are at stake. There are specific lives tied to your obedience. Specific faces. Specific names. People who will never see a healthy model of rest or presence if you do not learn yours. When we live scattered, they only see scattered. When we live planted, they get to see planted.
Your realm itself is at stake. The corner of the world you were meant to work and keep often sits like that forgotten green space in Katy. Technically there. Half mowed. Hard soil. Not claimed by anyone. Creation is waiting for sons and daughters to take their place. When we do not, the prairie never wakes up. The life stays hidden.
The next generation is at stake. Kids are always watching the adults around them. If we live from pressure, they will assume that is normal. If we treat exhaustion as maturity, they will think that growing up means losing your joy. If we live misaligned long enough, numb becomes the baseline. That is a quiet kind of inheritance, and not the kind we want to pass on.
Culture is at stake. Misaligned lives add up. Thin marriages. Shallow community. Churches that are busy but not rooted. Organizations that are efficient but not alive. At some point we look around and realize that everything is moving, but not much is actually teeming with life.
The garden keeps pulling me back to a different way.
When I am working from pressure, I can feel it in my body. I rush tasks that do not need rushing. I plant things that do not belong, just because I saw them somewhere else and thought I should have them too. I overwater. I overthink. I am present in body, but absent in spirit. The soil knows the difference.
When I return to presence, everything shifts. I move slower, but I get more done. I see small things I would have missed. A new insect I have never met. The way dew gathers on onion leaves. The quiet joy on someone’s face the first time they pull a carrot from the ground. My activity comes from peace, not panic. I remember my realm. I remember that I am not responsible for every need on earth. I am responsible to be faithful where my feet are.
The more I lean into that, the more I watch the world around me come back to life.
A man who could not feel his own worth begins to stand a little taller as he works his plot weekly. A mom who arrived with anxiety in her eyes starts to breathe more deeply as she walks the paths. None of this happens because we put on a show. It happens because we are learning our realm and staying there.
Teeming life is not loud. It is steady. It is often quiet at first.
In the pocket prairie, you have to stand still for a moment before you notice it. At first you only see grass. Then your eyes adjust. You notice a butterfly drifting through. A dragonfly landing on a stalk. The movement of a beetle at your feet. The breeze shifting the whole field at once. There is no single highlight. It is many small lives, each faithfully being what they were made to be.
That is what happens in a human life when we return to Genesis order. You might not see fireworks. You see fruit. Conversations deepen. Sleep becomes more restful. Work stops being a costume you wear and becomes an honest expression of who you are. You stop chasing every opportunity and you start saying yes to the right ones. You start saying no without apology. Your schedule may not look as full, but your days feel full of something else. Substance. Presence. Life.
In our lives, realm might look like a neighborhood, a family, a classroom, a small team, a parish, or a single acre of soil tucked behind a church. It might look like the few people who keep showing up while the crowd passes through. It might look like the assignment that does not impress anyone on paper, but that makes your spirit come alive when you give yourself to it.
When we receive that as our portion, instead of apologizing for it or trying to trade it in for someone else’s, something unlocks. We find that we are not stuck, we are planted. We discover that we are not behind, we are being prepared. We watch as the slow work of faithfulness begins to draw others in, not through promotion, but through presence.
This is what I want to spend my life on. Not chasing every open door, but stewarding the one garden God has trusted me with. Not trying to force growth on people, but making sure the soil they step into is healthy, honest, and at peace. Not trying to fill every gap in the world, but staying rooted where I have been placed.
Returning to Genesis order looks like this: learn your realm, work within it, and receive the blessing attached to it. Multiplication follows placement, not striving. When your calling flows from design and your activity from peace, the world around you begins to teem with life again.
And if you listen closely, you will hear it.
In the rustling prairie.
In the quiet conversations between rows.
In the steady, gentle sound of a life finally planted where it belongs.
