I know, I know it's not winter yet!!! Trust me I am the last person who would be wishing for winter. Actually the weather right now is just about perfect in my opinion. But winter is coming....(giggle) and I don't like it. I love being outside! I love being in the garden! I love, love, love to have dirt in my toes. Winter does not allow for any of that. It's usually cold and brown and nothing really looks alive.
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| Some of you see beauty in this picture and I think that is wonderful but it is just not there for me. |
And it's even worse when there is not even any snow to make things have a little glisten. The Bible is full of illustrations about gardening. Let's look at a couple of these Biblical gardens as we get ready for that season that seems to be without life.
John 15:1-17 is one of those passages. It got me thinking about how we are connected to God. Firstly it shows us what our relationship is to God. He is the gardener!!!! That simple statement is so freeing. We don't have to plant ourselves, we don't have to water ourselves, we don't have to pick our fruit, and best of all we don't have to prune ourselves. Let me tell you why this statement is so freeing for me. I love the self-help genre of books. I would say I am pretty much obsessed with it as a matter of fact. But just the title of this genre should give me a hint as to the problem, self-help!! God is the one who is supposed to be doing the pruning and trimming. I don't think I am going to ever break the cycle of reading these books, after all how else will I know how to fold my socks so they are happy or remind myself of my inner bad ass.
But the danger for me comes when I forget where my strength comes from. When I forget to give everything to God. I take the pruning shears right out of God's hands. Why on earth do I do that? Why would I want to take things from the Lord, the strongest force in the universe, and put it back on my plate? Who knows, but I do it all the time. Somewhere my connection to God gets lost. I seem to experience this most in the winter time. It's kinda like seasonal allergies but pertaining to my connection to my Lord and Savior.
I feel most connected to the vine, the Lord, when I am outside. When I am running, in the garden, hiking or on the beach.
So you can see where this is going, winter time is especially hard for me. Sometimes my connection to God starts to resemble the weather; foggy, grey and frozen. It's when I have to be intentional about strengthening the connection and turning the channel, but it is so tempting and easy too. When I see something on TV that I don't like I can change the channel, there are only a billion other things on. I can just forget about the last thing I was watching and totally remove it from my mind. It is easy to do the same thing with God. If I am on a different channel then I can just pretend He is not there. I can get bogged down in my woes: oh its so cold and grey, oh my body hurts, oh my clothes don't fit because I am sitting on my butt and eating too much junk! You know the drill. Then I turn to my self-help friends and try and get myself out of the hole I've dug. And yes some of the practical ideas I find are not in themselves bad things, but I cannot rely on myself for the strength I need to get our of that hole. I have to remember where to turn to.
This leads me to another garden in the Bible. Genesis Chapter 1, the story of creation, the beginning of the vine and branches so to speak. In the winter I tend to ask the question "What's so good about God's creation?" One of those questions I ask when I am deep down in the woe hole!!! My pessimistic winter self is rearing her ugly head. I have to put my heat miser away and see all the beauty around me.
God's creation is a 3D picture of Him for me to see, feel and touch. Do I need to go out into the cold and blustery wind to see it? Do I have to ski, snowboard or snowmobile to get that in the winter? Absolutely not. Some people can but not me. But I can see it in the kid's at our school having fun in the snow on the playground outside my picture window. I can see it sitting in front of our (fake) fireplace snuggled up with the perfect mate He has sent me. And because I am made in His image I can see it in the mirror. And I can share the image, that 3D picture of Him to others!!
So even in the bleak midwinter snow my relationship with God is still the same. He is the gardener and I am the plant in His garden connected directly to Him. He created this garden for me (and my brothers and sisters) so that I would take care of it and we would take care of each other as He would do. I am not in charge of my pruning or anyone else's. That is the work of The Gardener. He will prune me and it will be for my own good. It enhances the work he puts before me in the garden. And when we see each other in those woe filled winter holes (whether they happen in winter or not) we can reach out a Christ-like hand and help each other. So why did I write this in late August? Well, I did start it last year and time has also gotten away from me a little bit. But I also wrote it as kind of a challenge to myself, maybe to you too if the message sounds familiar. I need to challenge myself to not change the channel when the woe is overwhelming, I need to see God in new and different ways, and I need to strengthen my connection to God with His word! So bring on dark, dreary January, I am ready to find His beauty all around me. (Just not yet!)
