About Shared Tomatoes
I’m Tim George. I’m a retired physician, a spiritual director, and a writer. Much of my life has been spent listening—to patients, to people I accompany, to those I love, and to my own changing life.
Shared Tomatoes is where I gather some of what I have received along the way—and share some of it with others.
Shared Tomatoes began with a simple conviction: ordinary life is worth noticing.
These pages grew from years of listening—to patients, to people seeking their way, to Scripture, to silence, and to the small moments in which God sometimes becomes visible.
Why Shared Tomatoes?
Years ago, a friend from church began bringing us tomatoes from his garden. There was nothing complicated about it. He grew them. He had more than he needed. And he shared them.
Then he suffered a stroke.
The tomatoes might easily have stopped. Instead, another friend began helping him tend the garden and make sure the tomatoes still arrived.
I have thought about those tomatoes many times since.
What stays with me is not really the tomatoes. It is the quiet generosity surrounding them—the growing, the giving, the receiving, and then, when circumstances changed, the finding of another way to keep giving.
Those shared tomatoes became an image for what I hope happens here: ordinary things received as gift, generously shared, creating connection—and sometimes revealing something holy.
That is where the name Shared Tomatoes comes from.
Not really from tomatoes, of course.
From the ordinary gifts we receive, and the ways we find to share them.
Ready to enter the house?