It is great to be in the garden again.
Whether it be horticultural, or human, I love watching growth. It is pretty much my favourite thing to do. I delight in nurturing plants, but also people, to completeness, to maturity, to fruitfulness and to all they are designed to be. The principles and the rhythms by which God works in the garden are so similar to the way he works in us. For those with eyes to see, a walk around a garden in its different seasons can bring such encouragement.
A couple of months ago, the rhododendron tree outside the front door looked like this … with full, dense blossoms above and a speckled, fragile carpet below.
A work of God in full blossom. It is beautiful … always.
But a storm came through with wind and rain, lasting for a few days. All the blossoms above ended up on the carpet below. Purple turned to brown ever so quickly. When the decay was raked up, it amounted to so little …
I felt so sad. I really did.
Is this the way of a work of God as well? “Meaningless, Meaningless”, says the garden?
A few weeks later, I was walking down the concrete path. My head turned towards the rhododendron, only to see a quite different sight.
The bare, broad trunks were sprouting new growth. In fact, at the very time the blossoms were falling, this new growth was beginning to push out of the tree in places where you’d least expect it. The blossom may drop and fade, but then the sprouts emerge … and one day the blossoms will return in new places and on new growth.
God plants hope in the garden … and in our lives when we walk the seasons with him.
Might this be an image especially for you as this difficult 2020 draws to a close?
nice chatting
Paul
PS (1): We had five years pastoring a church on the south coast of the South Island, here in New Zealand. Unlike the northern hemisphere, the south is where winters are cold, bitterly cold. We were young. The people were good. The work was hard. Earlier this year we travelled down there again, just as winter was trying to become spring. As we wandered one day, we saw a forsythia, a blessed forsythia. When all is so lifeless and so colourless for so long, the first sign of spring is this blaze of yellow. Before any green appears, before any other plant stirs to life, there is this solitary golden fire in the garden. I so enjoyed seeing my friend again.
God plants hope in the garden … and in our lives when we walk the seasons with him.
PS (2): India doesn’t do the four seasons in the same way as we do. Everything — and I mean ‘everything’ — revolves around the monsoon. When will it arrive? How good will it be? Despite its many massive cities, India is still overwhelmingly rural and its farmers are still dependent on the rain. The seasons tend to be two: dry and wet. Here is the grassy patch down onto which we looked from our first floor apartment in Bangalore. Isn’t it so lush? Even now I look at it in total disbelief because for many months of the year, it is nothing more than a slab of dead and dusty dirt. It is inconceivable that such a slab of dead and dusty dirt could yield this luscious green carpet. But it did, it does and it will do again.
God plants hope in the garden … and in our lives when we walk the seasons with him.
About Me
the art of unpacking
After a childhood in India, a theological training in the USA and a pastoral ministry in Southland (New Zealand), I spent twenty years in theological education in New Zealand — first at Laidlaw College and then at Carey Baptist College, where I served as principal. In 2009 I began working with Langham Partnership and since 2013 I have been the Programme Director (Langham Preaching). Through it all I've cherished the experience of the 'gracious hand of God upon me' and I've relished the opportunity to 'unpack', or exegete, all that I encounter in my walk through life with Jesus.
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