Maria knows,

perhaps better than most, that for things to grow, there must be patience. For things to flourish, one needs resilience and humility, a willingness both to get hands dirty and to let go.

Having moved from the mountains of Guatemala to Immokalee, Fla., 22 years ago, Maria understands the necessity of hard work in cultivating something, whether it be a verdant garden or a new life.

She is one of thousands of migrant workers in this South Florida agricultural community who, regrettably, have learned that a place at the table will most likely not be offered to them. If they want it, they must take it themselves.

Quite simply, there is no alternative.

“I made a decision to come here to help my children get ahead,” Maria said.

Her story echoes those of scores of migrant workers who traverse oceans of water or sand to secure a better life for their families. The vast majority do not cross our borders out of malignance; they do so out of desperation.

In Maria’s case, her choice was really no choice at all. She left behind her children to work in Florida because, following the death of her husband, she did what she had to do to feed them and make available for them more options than she had.

“My husband passed away and left me with three children,” she said. “I was a week away from giving birth to my youngest when he died.”

Immokalee provides the United States with the bulk of its winter tomato crop, serving as a breadbasket of sorts for the rest of the nation. It is on the backs of migrant workers like Maria that this work is accomplished. Our trip to the grocery stores is their livelihood; our convenience is their necessity.

These workers are underpaid, malnourished and, as is the case for innumerable migrants of color in this country, scorned for their presence by those reliant on their labor.

Simply put, they would not choose to endure these injustices if they had other options. They would not leave behind their families unless it were paramount.

“My daughter, the youngest, is four years old, I left her and since then I have not seen her. It is a pain to leave my young children to come and work in this place, so that they can study, so that they can have,” Maria said. “That is why I made the decision to come here.”

It is the story of many minoritized communities in the Western world: this resilience under injustice and this insistence upon dignity in a deeply indignant society. Even under oppression as heavy as the Florida heat, Maria has pressed on, building a life in a new and not always hospitable place.

She serves as a partner gardener with Cultivate Abundance and Misión Peniel, making sure, whether through gardening or grocery shopping, that the food banks stay full and her people stay healthy.

“Maria is a force of nature,” said Rick Burnette, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel, who, along with his wife, Ellen, co-founded Cultivate Abundance. “She knows everything that’s going on in Immokalee. If there is food that’s available somewhere, she will be able to clue people in.”

A key tenet of Cultivate Abundance’s work is providing people with culturally appropriate foods, nourishing in their nutritional and spiritual contents alike. Maria plays an indispensable role in making sure this happens.

“She will find produce of the types we’re looking for. I don’t know how she does it, but she finds it, and she brings it,” Rick said. “As a recipient, she’s also a donor.”

Over the two decades she’s lived in the United States, Maria has developed quite the green thumb, planting such Latin American staples as chipilín. It’s a staple in her native Guatemala and resembles spinach, albeit with a vastly different flavor profile.

Loaming her hands in the soil provides purpose as well as sustenance, community in addition to a crop.

“I feel part of the garden, and I feel like I am also there just to help them,” Maria said. “But to think that I am not just wasting time, no. I am learning different things, and we also teach people what is in the garden and what is done in the garden.”

No stranger to new life, Maria has also grown her family even while distant from many of its members.

Most of her children are now grown. Since arriving in the United States, however, she’s given birth to a boy named Marco who recently turned six.

Soon after his birth, he was diagnosed with Down Syndrome. This added unforeseen difficulty to the already-trying task of raising a child away from one’s native land and family.

But that hasn’t stopped Maria and her son from bringing light to their community.

“Everyone loves Marco,” Rick said.

Like fertile soil, Marco has helped Maria with growing her life here, building connections in unexpected—and therefore miraculous— ways.

“Now my life is more different, because I am meeting many people through Marco and through our garden. Many people come to the garden,” she said. “But I’m glad to be there with them; I’m very satisfied.”

A place at the table was never guaranteed to Maria. Yet, with tireless faith, the presence of a Christ who was himself a refugee, and her fair share of dirt under nails, she insisted upon a place there all the same.

Of course, in God’s economy, it was her table all along.

“A place at the table means that we are all ready or prepared to have food on the table,” she said. “And for me, from the garden, it means helping them to maintain, to have the produce for the people who are in need.”

This is sadly ironic because we literally could not, and do not, live without it.

Across the peninsula from the more cosmopolitan Atlantic coast lies Immokalee, a small farming community of about 20,000. While not nearly as well-known as Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale, Immokalee is no less important. It provides the bulk of America’s winter tomato crop, thanks to its subtropical climate and to a community overlooked as its environs—migrant workers.

“Florida is not exactly the best place to be a farmworker or a migrant,” said Pastor Miguel Estrada, director of Misión Peniel in Immokalee.

These workers, immigrants from Latin American countries like Mexico, Haiti and Guatemala, reside in a portion of our country famed for its vacationing but steeped in disease, boasting world-renowned diversity but subject to increasingly conservative policies and outlooks toward immigrants.

“Workers just leave behind family and relatives at home,” Estrada said. “It’s a sacrifice what they are doing for the rest of their families at home in order to survive for them over there.”

It is not vanity or flippancy which motivates people to migrate thousands of miles away from their home countries. It is a necessity sparked by political instability and fanned by the suffering of loved ones.

Regrettably, what swaths of immigrants face on this side of the border is more suffering.

Those most responsible for feeding the country struggle themselves to be fed. Immokalee sits squarely in the middle of a food desert, a region in which inhabitants face limited access to healthy and affordable food.

“At the end of the day, what they keep for themselves is hardly enough to have one meal per day. That’s hardly what happens,” Estrada said. “And then sometimes, it’s even less than that.”

Estrada and his church partner with Cultivate Abundance to address, if not end food insecurity in Immokalee.

It is not too fine a point to say that Cultivate Abundance, in tandem with Estrada, and under the leadership of Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel Rick Burnette and his wife, Ellen, invite scores of minoritized people to the banquet table.

South Florida provides a stark backdrop to Jesus’ mandate in Luke 14:12-14, for the poor and the rich, the outcast and the ingroup, crowded together between the two coasts, squished by bodies of water and systems of inequality.

It would be easy to invite down from their Miami high-rises the rich and famous. Instead, Cultivate Abundance sets the table for those for whom God exercises preferential concern.

Thanks to Estrada’s shared identity and cultural background, it is done in an equitable, presence-focused way.

“Miguel Estrada is an amazing man. He came from Guatemala with his family in order to do this work in Immokalee,” Rick Burnette said. “He was called to do this work in Immokalee.”

How this work transpires would likely ring familiar to most within CBF, manifesting as the well-worn system of food banks and distribution centers.

The food they share, however, is specific and unique.

“Misión Peniel has been finding food through local food banks, at least two in this area, bringing the food in each week and distributing it every Friday afternoon,” Rick said. “We have a food share time from 3:30 to 6:30 on Friday.”

Because the food banks are local, the food is culturally sensitive and appropriate, nourishing the migrant workers’ souls as well as their bodies. Far from standard U.S. American fare, the meals waft of their homes, aromatically connecting them to places they have long since vacated.

It is ministry in sensory pastoral care in texture and taste.

“When people are eating, they literally open their hearts,” Estrada said. “So when you feed them the culturally appropriate food, you are feeding, not just stomachs but heart and souls, too. And that makes a huge difference.”

The bread Jesus broke, the ritual he instructed us to do in his remembrance, need not be limited to one cultural expression or hegemonic liturgy. It is a eucharist communing with a universal Christ, as aptly expressed in bread as it is in tortilla, in pupusa and injera, Skittles and iced tea.

Serving familiar cuisine is but one way Estrada establishes presence and trust among the Immokalee migrant worker community. Food in and of itself does not constitute the invitation. It is the fruit of a long-term relationship.

“He is basically the pastor of Immokalee in a lot of ways. People know him, they respect him,” Ellen said. “They come to him with their problems. Every day of his life, he is living it for these people, this community and just sacrificial, loving relationship with them.”

The farmworkers in Immokalee are making $60 to $65 dollars a day. These wages in a food desert, or area dense with produce but ridden with poverty, are not enough to feed themselves and their family. Pastor Estrada works with the Burnettes to provide culturally appropriate food. “If you really want to learn about anyone’s culture, get the time and chance to sit with the other people and eat,” Estrada said. “That’s the best place.”

This is no small feat in a town saddled by a 37 percent poverty rate. It is no miniscule task in a state openly hostile to much of the diversity of which the Kingdom of God is composed.

But the Latin American people who travel internationally simply to feed their own families deserve, at the very least, not to go hungry. Those who help provide hospitality to the rest of the country are entitled to hospitality in their own neighborhood.

It is to this work Estrada and the Burnettes are called; it is to this challenge they rise. And it is to that table they extend an open, hospitable invitation.

“We feel really blessed to have the opportunity to work together with Rick and Ellen,” Estrada said. “They feel exactly our need; they understood what was needed around this community; they have been open enough to learn from the community and become part of them.”

Since this is the economy of God, what CBF and Estrada and his church reap, they sow. What they dole out, they get back.

It is, not to be glib, a harvest.

“That’s the beauty we have been learning around this place and this ministry,” Estrada said, “that the more you open space on the table, the better the blessing is.”

100% to the Offering for Global Missions will support the presence of CBF field personnel serving in the U.S. and around the world. OF YOUR GIFT

LUKE 14:12-14