Like a Garden

What if your life is like a garden?

Hopefully, there will be some nice things already there, even when the garden is new. Stuff like brains and beauty, or perhaps there will be attributes like a beautiful voice or athletic talent, maybe some type of intense drive or musical ability. 

 As a child, the garden of your life gets tended to by other people.  Like a new garden, you are little and at other people’s mercy as to what gets cared for and planted. Hopefully, careful, caring people will lovingly feed and water the good gifts and seedlings. They will study the wind, the weather, and sun exposure; they will provide support, feed your talents, steward and guard your gifts. They pull out the weeds, things like unbelief, pride, self-centeredness, and laziness. They’ll bring other mentors and teachers into your life, who will also coax the best fruit and flowers into being. They will  painstakingly kneel down and plant faith, humility, peace and patience. Hopefully, they water everything with prayer.
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It’s also possible that what was planted when the garden was new, was not cared for or tended at all. Then as an adult, the difficult work of weeding needs to happen. Emotional injuries, wrong thinking, bad perceptions and misconceptions can be painful to remove. Dangerous habits and relationships are hard to dig up.

At some point, the stewardship of the garden gets transferred to the owner of the garden, you. You become responsible for your time, money, gifting and affection, in addition to who comes into your garden, and who’s allowed to stay. You will need to weed out offenses, temptation, and bitterness. You will have to make sure the planting of passionate faith is not allowed to get too cold or dry.

Through it all, the Master Gardner is faithful to coach us and instruct us. He has a beautiful vision for you as a fragrant, fruitful garden. He has the tools and the knowledge. He knows what to uproot and tear out. He also knows how to plant, water and to tend. Isn’t it fabulous news to know that He’s committed to seeing His beautiful plan for your life brought to completion. He never gives up.