Changing the Atmosphere with a Hanging Basket

Terry’s Story

I love gardening.  I love colour.  One of the goals on coming to Toxteth was the passion to bring the beauty of colour to the street.  Inner city communities often lack garden space and therefore the richness that colour brings to life.  Gradually our garden in the Dingle matured, along with the annual planting of hanging baskets.  Year on year neighbours remarked on the beauty, asked if I could teach them how to plant baskets and went home to improve their own patch. Six years on from our arrival, in the summer of 1995, the baskets on our walls were the best I had planted!  Yet beauty is not always appreciated but destroyed.  I came out one morning to find my two best baskets smashed with one ripped off the wall and missing.  My first thought was ‘you b*!*%$ds’, my second, ‘Baptist Minister’!  Though we had been robbed, our car stolen several times, stones thrown at windows and my office ransacked, nothing hurt me more than the mindless vandalism to our baskets.  All day at work it felt like a heavy weight pushing on my body.  At home in the evening, as I reflected in our back garden, I heard an inner-voice - ‘put a cross outside’.  Within minutes I had knocked two pieces of wood together and inserted the cross in a small patch of earth adjacent to the ‘basket-wall’.  I also prayed about a scripture the Spirit of God brought to mind. 1 Samuel 5:1-11. ‘Lord, please make that missing hanging basket as obnoxious as the Ark of the Covenant was to the Philistines’.  Sometime after planting, the youngest gang arrived to view the cross and an argument followed - ‘kick it out of the ground’ said one.  A knock at the door followed. ‘Eh Pasty (affectionate term for Pastor) who is buried there’?  My reply ‘there’s no one buried there’.  ‘Well, what’s that cross doing there’? ‘Your budgie’s buried there’. When I pointed to the living budgie, the burial question was repeated, to which I replied, in a moment of divine revelation, ‘no one’s buried there, I am angry and giving it to Jesus’.

The lad left and reported to his gang, ‘the pasty’s angry and he’s giving it to Jesus’.  Same scenario was repeated mid-evening by an older gang but no knock on the door.  At around 11pm, on a warm June night with our windows open, we heard our older teens rehearsing the script.  ‘Kick it out, no you kick it out, I can’t I’m a Catholic’!  I turned to Ann and said ‘I can’t believe that cross will be there in the morning.  When I opened the door in the morning, there was the cross and beside the cross … the basket minus begonias!  My reaction was a series of fist pumps followed by a loud cry - ‘Yes, yes, yes’.

I believe that incident changed something from heaven to earth.  Our car was never stolen again, no baskets disappeared, no windows were assaulted, no more bikes stolen.  At church the regular breaking of windows almost ceased.  Neighbours who would stand at their doors and laugh at thefts from cars, and never intervene, now responded with respect and action.  ‘Leave it with us Pastor we’ll sort it’ was now a community watchword.   The relationship between church and community was strengthened.  Finally, people began to believe in what we were doing and were prepared to stand on our side.  The black cloud over Toxteth, that successive prayer teams had identified, lifted!  The atmosphere changed.

This, the power of the cross …