I am no gardener, but I enjoy beautiful gardens and love walking among flowers. Yesterday I had the joy of spending the day at Woldie’s Lavender and Nature Farm and seeing loads of lavender, wild flowers, bees, butterflies and birds.
Wherever there is a beautiful garden, you will find someone who has cared enough to plant beautiful things and someone who has worked hard to bring this beauty to completion.
The mundane tasks of weeding, cutting grass, hoeing and tidying must be done regularly to keep a garden looking smart and neat. Careful attention and hard work are essential to a garden.
It’s much easier to do this on a reguar basis: as with so many things in life, ‘little and often’ is a gardener’s motto. It’s much easier to remove small weeds than to procrastinate and thus face the problems of more deeply rooted ones!
Hosea tells God’s people to ‘sow righteousness for yourselves, reap the fruit of unfailing love and break up your unploughed land.’ (Hos 10;12) We have to ensure we show good things in our lives if we want to reap good fruit. Bad attitudes, careless words and wrong thuoghts have to be dug out with determination and ruthlessness. Good attitudes, kind words and true thoughts must be planted and nurtured. (Phil 4:8, Col 3:15-17, Gal 5:17-23)
There is never room for complacency and inaction in a garden. Spiritual growth similarly is something we must nurture, doing our best to provide good soil (breaking up the unploughed ground) and caring for growth with the devotion of a gardener. Effort and ongoing work are always required.