Welcome to the rawness of what God is teaching me in this season.
Picture a huge garden. Not your typical vegetable garden outside your back porch, but rather a field with rows that go on past what our eyes can see or our minds can grasp. A garden full of abundance yet still polluted with areas of scarcity. Rows rich with fruit, life, and nutrients. Rows left unattended now littered with weeds. Rows plowed but not yet planted. Rows dry, lifeless, and full of stones. Rows still not discovered. This garden is the garden of my heart.
God is the gardener and sustainer. He is the one who owns, provides for, nourishes, prunes, and cultivates the land.
The vastness of the garden showing my personal relationship with my loving God. A garden that needs my time, dependence, commitment, patience, diligence.
My heart is the soil. The condition of the soil is determined by the state of my heart.
The rows of vegetation are the fruit of the Spirit. The richness coming from knowing God’s character, time in the Word, devotion to prayer, walking in obedience, stepping out in faith against fear, doing hard things, sharing the gospel, and simply by knowing who I am because of whose I am.
The neglected rows are where the enemy uses lies to take our attention away from the Lord by disguising truth as weeds.
The unplanted rows are what God is preparing me for next.
The lifeless rows tainted by rocks are where my heart is hardened by shame, fear, pride, the past, lack of discipline, disobedience.
The rows not yet undiscovered represents the depth of God I haven’t discovered yet. It shows that I am never finished growing and that God is not done with me.
God, help me delight in you in all seasons. Help me to remain in a posture of worship despite my circumstances. Help me to see the process of sustaining and cultivating the garden of my heart. Help me be in tune with you, the gardener and sustainer of my life. Reveal more and more of the goodness of the One who tends my heart. Help me spend time with you. Grow in me dependence, commitment, and patience for the work you are doing in me. God, rid me of dry, lifeless soil, and make in me a heart of good soil. Show me the beauty of fruitfulness, but help me to not shield my eyes of the growth that is still to come. God, help me to rejoice in the seasons where you call me tear up the land again and again, give me the means to nurture it back to health, and let the seeds you plant bear fruits of righteousness.
