The Boundaries of a Calling
Naming the Realm of The Neighborhood Garden Project
By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project
Genesis keeps giving me language I did not know I needed.
God forms realms, then fills them, then blesses them. Sea and sky. Land and garden. Specific places, with specific lives, made for specific work. The more I walk with Him, the more I realize this is not just how creation started. It is how He still works with us.
The Neighborhood Garden Project is one of those realms.
From the outside, it can look like a community garden nonprofit in west Houston. Raised beds. Pocket prairies. People coming and going. Grants. Partnerships. Board meetings. It would be easy to treat it as a meaningful project that runs for a while and then fades when life changes.
That is not what it is for me.
This is a realm God formed before I ever had words for it. A place I have been assigned to, not a project I decided to try. I know that because when I step out of it, my world collapses. My breathing changes. My clarity disappears. I have tried to imagine safer versions of my life, and everything in me shuts down. I cannot unknow what He has revealed here.
If this really is a God formed realm, then it has God formed boundaries. A shape. A “this is what it is” and a “this is what it is not.”
Naming those boundaries has helped me stay where I am supposed to stand and stop blaming the enemy for the chaos that comes when I step outside of them.
Here is what I see.
Formed Before I Arrived
The more I sit with Genesis, the more I see that God does not wait on us to start forming our realm. He goes first.
Before humans ever take a breath, God has already separated light from darkness, gathered the waters, raised up dry land, and filled the world with plants and creatures. Atmosphere, food, rhythms, and beauty are all in place. Then He creates people and places them in a garden that is already functioning.
Provision precedes presence.
Realm precedes assignment.
This is not just ancient poetry. It is how God still works.
We are not dropped into an empty world and told to start from scratch. We are born into a story God has already been forming. Locations. Relationships. Gifts. Even longings we cannot explain. There are realms prepared in His heart long before we have language for them.
The Garden Project has shown me this in real time.
Long before we ever had a name or a logo, God was forming the realm. A church praying for a garden and not knowing how to start. A neighbor across the street praying for that land to be used long before I was born. Two decades of my life spent cultivating food, learning soil with my hands. Then, in the middle of all of that, His clear instruction.
Stop cultivating food and start cultivating people.
He was not giving me a random new idea. He was inviting me into a realm He had already been shaping. A realm that would now also be used to form me.
God does not only form the realm for us. He uses the realm to form us. As we step into what He has prepared and begin to steward it with Him, we are the ones being reshaped. Our pace. Our trust. Our view of money. Our view of people. Our picture of what blessing even is.
I am not building something for God while He watches from a distance. I am being built with God inside a realm He already authored. My contribution is real, but it is not the origin. I am a steward inside His design, not the architect of my own kingdom.
If God truly formed this realm before I arrived, then misplacement is not just about landing in the wrong job. It is about living outside the story He prepared for me to walk in.
That is why the boundaries matter.
Boundary 1: Purpose
From programs to people
The first boundary is purpose.
The Neighborhood Garden Project exists to cultivate people through the garden, not to run garden programs.
Inside this boundary:
The soil is a teacher.
Beds, tools, and plants are ways to help people move from survival into becoming.
The focus is inner formation that flows from real work in real soil.
We care about fruit, but the fruit we watch for is not just vegetables. It is peace, courage, rest, and identity.
Outside this boundary:
We become “the community garden people” who manage plots and keep things looking nice.
We turn into a food production site or activity center.
We exist to keep people busy and entertained, instead of cultivating them.
If the garden stops cultivating people and only manages activity, we have stepped out of our realm. The purpose has slipped. The blessing begins to feel thin. Things might still look successful from a distance, but the life in it drains away.
Boundary 2: People
For the ones who keep showing up
The second boundary is people.
The Neighborhood Garden Project is for those who keep showing up and are willing to be cultivated, not for everyone who wants to “help” or “volunteer.”
Inside this boundary:
We speak of co-stewards, not volunteers.
We pay attention to who returns, not just who visits.
We invest deeply in those who are willing to be disrupted and slowed down, not just those who like the idea of a garden.
We expect that the work will change people, not just use them.
Outside this boundary:
We try to be for everyone.
We reshape the pace and clarity of the work so more people will feel comfortable.
We lower our language so no one feels confronted.
We treat the garden as a place where people can consume meaning without being asked to change.
When we start designing around the crowd instead of the co-stewards, we leave our realm. The garden begins to lose its honesty. It turns into another place where people can hide from transformation instead of entering it.
This is why I say often that The Neighborhood Garden Project is not for everybody. In fact, I do not believe it is for most people. That is not arrogance. It is honesty. Realm is always specific.
That specificity is not cruelty. It is kindness. It protects the depth of what God is actually doing.
Boundary 3: Place
In real soil, with real neighbors
The third boundary is place.
The Neighborhood Garden Project lives in real soil, anchored to real neighborhoods and parishes. It is not an abstract strategy. It is not just an idea. It is bodies in a place, over time.
Inside this boundary:
There is actual ground under our feet. Clay, sand, mulch, roots, heat, rain.
We are embedded in worshiping communities that are willing to become Kingdom embassies, joining us as co-stewards of their land and life, not treating us as tenants to house or a project to sponsor.
The garden sits quietly inside the flow of daily life. We do not advertise or shout for attention, but we are visible to those who are looking. Some will never notice. A few will see, draw near, and keep returning.
Outside this boundary:
We spread into everywhere and nowhere at once.
We “partner” in name only, without shared presence or shared cost.
We say yes to any property that opens, regardless of whether the people and place are ready to be formed.
If we move into sites that do not actually want to be transformed, we have crossed our boundary. That land may belong to someone else’s assignment, but not ours. Our realm has a smell to it. You can feel when a parish or a neighborhood is ready for this kind of work, and when it only wants a project on the side.
Boundary 4: Practice
Pace set by presence, not pressure
The fourth boundary is practice.
The Neighborhood Garden Project moves at the pace of presence and formation, not urgency and output.
Inside this boundary:
We work from rest, not rest from work.
We live in slow, repetitive rhythms. Thursdays with veterans. Weekly co-steward times. Monthly potlucks. Quiet mornings of weeding and watering.
We allow honest disruption. We invite people to lay things down, not just add more.
We protect the garden as a living community of people and place, not a slate of activities that needs to be filled.
Outside this boundary:
We fill the calendar to look productive.
We shape gatherings for optics, not fruit.
We measure success mostly by volume. How many people came through. How many “served.” How many pounds were harvested.
We let urgency, not discernment, set the pace.
I can feel this boundary in my body. When the garden starts to feel like a machine that I have to keep feeding, I know we have stepped out of our realm. Pressure has taken the lead. Presence has been pushed to the side.
That exhaustion is not always the enemy. Often it is the built in outcome of doing things our own way. When we stretch beyond the pace God gave us, the drain is already written into that rhythm. The garden and my own nervous system start saying the same thing.
You crossed a line. Come back.
Boundary 5: Provision
Stewards, not owners
The fifth boundary is provision.
The Neighborhood Garden Project is sustained by God’s authorship moving His resources through stewards, not by funders who act like owners.
Inside this boundary:
We look for relational funding.
We welcome money that can sit inside our pace and posture without trying to rewrite them.
We walk with people and institutions who know they are stewards, not sources.
We refuse to let scarcity govern our decisions.
Outside this boundary:
We let grants or institutions define our assignment.
We bend the work to fit reporting requirements that hollow out our core.
We treat one funder like the lifeline of the garden.
We answer questions as if the garden lives or dies by any single contribution.
I hear the same question in different forms.
“How will you sustain this when our contributions end.”
On the surface, it sounds wise. Underneath, there is an assumption that reveals a lot. It treats the contribution as if it belongs to the giver, as if they are the owner and God is the extra. It quietly centers their resources as the source of life.
I do not see it that way.
If God formed this realm, then every contribution is His before it is ever written on a check. People and institutions are stewards for a moment in time. They are given seed to sow, not empires to build. The real question is not, “What happens when our contributions end,” but, “Will we be found faithful with what was never ours in the first place.”
The moment scarcity is no longer allowed to steward God’s resources, the world begins to heal. Soil is restored instead of stripped. Time is given instead of hoarded. People become more important than metrics. Creation responds when surrender, not fear, sits in the driver’s seat.
In this work, I cannot hold a scarcity story and a Genesis story at the same time. Either God formed this realm and will sustain it in His way and timing, or this is just an inspiring project that lives and dies on human funding. I have chosen to live as if God is the author.
So when someone asks, “How will you sustain this when our contributions end,” I quietly remember the boundary. You are not the source. You are a steward. If God is finished using you in this story, He knows how to move His resources through someone else. My role is not to cling. My role is to remain faithful in the realm He gave me.
Time will show who is actually sustaining this.
When I Step Outside the Boundaries
Putting language to these boundaries has shown me something simple and sobering.
When I stay inside them, there is peace, even when things are hard. There is weight, but it is shared. There is a sense that I am standing where I was formed to stand.
When I step outside them, my world collapses.
Not instantly, but steadily.
I start answering to urgency instead of presence.
I start carrying people who never agreed to be cultivated.
I start chasing money instead of walking with stewards.
I start planting tomatoes in the bog and blaming the heat when they drown.
For a long time I called that collapse warfare. I thought the enemy was attacking my assignment. Now I see that a lot of that pain was built into crossing my own boundaries. It was the ache of misplacement, not always the sting of opposition.
There is still real warfare. It often shows up right at the point of aligned faithfulness, when you are finally standing in your realm and walking in obedience. When that happens, you feel the difference. The resistance does not come from your own scattered choices. It comes as a pushback against what God is clearly doing.
But much of the daily drain, at least in my story, has not been that. It has been the garden, and my own body, telling the truth.
You stepped outside the boundaries. Come back.
The Narrow Road Few Find
The Narrow Road Few Find
All of this can sound very narrow-minded from the outside. For some, it is hard to digest. It lands as, “This is not for me. It is too narrow. Too specific. Too defined.”
In a world that celebrates keeping every option open, saying “this is what we are” and “this is what we are not” feels offensive. People hear boundaries and assume exclusion. They hear clarity and assume pride. To some, our boundaries look like stubbornness.
I see it differently.
Jesus talked about a narrow road that few find, and that narrow road leads to life. For me, the boundaries of The Neighborhood Garden Project are part of that road. They are not walls to keep people out. They are the shape of the life God has invited us into.
Within these boundaries, we are accepting of all who are willing to be formed by the same Life that is forming us. Anyone can step into the garden. Anyone can walk the paths, feel the soil, sit at the table. The invitation is wide. The conditions are the same for everyone. We do not soften the boundaries for some and sharpen them for others. The same pace, the same posture, the same call to become.
What is narrow is not who can enter, but what we will agree to carry.
The boundaries keep us from chasing every need that appears under the banner of “serving others.” They protect us from the temptation to run after every crisis, every opportunity, every request that wants to borrow our language but not our life. They help us ask a better question than “Is this a need.” They help us ask, “Is this our assignment.”
When we honor that difference, something beautiful happens.
We stop trying to be everyone’s answer.
We stop confusing activity with obedience.
We stop using “service” as a way to avoid the harder work of discernment.
The boundaries keep us in a place where we can see clearly who God has actually assigned to us. The faces that return. The hearts that respond to the pace. The people who are willing to stand inside these boundaries and let the garden do its deep work.
It may feel too narrow for some. That is all right.
I would rather walk a narrow road that leads to life than spend my years running in every direction and calling it love. These boundaries are not about limiting compassion. They are about making sure our compassion is rooted, real, and actually fruitful in the realm God formed for us.
For Those Wrestling With Their Realm
I am starting to see that this is not just about The Neighborhood Garden Project. It is about how God works with people in every generation.
He forms realms.
He invites us into them.
He uses those realms to form us.
Then He lets life multiply around us as we steward what He already authored.
This is a deep truth anyone can wrestle with in their own story.
Not everyone is called to a garden. Your realm might be a classroom, a kitchen table, a neighborhood, a shop, a small business, a tiny church, a group of kids who keep ending up in your living room. The point is not to copy my assignment. The point is to ask God to show you yours.
If you want a place to start, sit with these questions:
Where do I feel most alive, in a way that pulls me toward God rather than away from Him
Where has God already been at work long before I arrived, and now I cannot shake the sense that I am supposed to stay
What kind of work leaves me pleasantly tired instead of hollow and drained
Where do I keep trying to leave, only to find that when I step away, my world collapses
What am I trying to carry under the banner of “serving others” that God never actually asked me to carry
Let yourself wrestle.
Pay attention to the places where exhaustion feels built in. Ask if that tiredness is really warfare, or if it is the ache of misplacement. Pay attention to the spaces where, even when things are hard, there is a steady kind of peace. That is often the edge of your realm.
You do not have to figure all of this out in one moment. Realms are often revealed over time. But you can begin by telling God the truth.
Show me the realm You formed for me.
Show me where I have been living outside of it.
Give me courage to step into what You prepared, even if it looks narrow from the outside.
Teach me to stay there long enough for life to begin to teem around me.
If Genesis is true, then you were never meant to live as a random life in a random place, reacting to random needs. You were meant to walk with God inside a real realm, with real boundaries, where blessing is not just a feeling, but a functional capacity to become who you were created to be.
You were not made to chase everything. You were made to stand where you were formed to stand.
