My Messy Garden
FEELING THE NEED for a concentrated time of prayer one morning, I stepped onto the patio with Bible in hand. I felt unsettled and discouraged. Things were not going as I thought they should, and I felt my heart tugging in several directions. The needs in my life seemed numerous. I longed for direction, but my prayers seemed to hang suspended without answers. How was my world fitting together?
I cozied myself into one of the lawn chairs and gazed about the wilderness of my yard. It was wild and wonderful to me, but messy at the same time with fern and philodendron meandering about, overgrown and out of control. Certain bushes flowered while others waited for another season to bloom. The camellia bush, flush with pink blossoms, vied to distract from the weeds winding through beds, spoiling what should have otherwise been quite pretty.
An image came to mind of a scene from a book I’d recently been reading that is rich in symbolism. In The Shack, the protagonist Makenzie, who is struggling through some of the ironies of his faith, is working in a garden that is a chaos of color, desperately confusing, extremely messy, but beautiful at the same time. He dutifully works alongside a character, representing the Holy Spirit, but is baffled as to why the garden is so messy and what they are doing in it.
Gently, the character representing the Holy Spirit, explains to Makenzie why they are digging together in this messy garden. “This garden is you?” he says. “This garden is your soul.” “Together you and I, we have been working with a purpose in your heart. And it is wild and beautiful and perfectly in process. To you it seems like a mess, but I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive.”
The image resonated with me as I considered my own confusion and lack of direction. Was this similar to how I was? My messy garden and my messy life, both in process? Both wild and beautiful at the same time? Could the messiness in my life actually be part of the beauty? My messy garden certainly was in process, but was it also a picture of my own soul, pretty in spots, but unkempt and messy in others?
As I read my Bible that day and contemplated the truth I saw in my garden and my own life as it related to the scene from The Shack, I realized this had been one of God’s messages throughout the ages. When we allow God to work in our lives, He uses our strengths and weaknesses, pain and joy, failures and successes for His good purpose. In the complexity of our circumstances, the Holy Spirit joyfully cultivates the beauty and messiness of our lives, scrambling it all together to form a perfect design that pulsates with new life as it emerges from the confusion of its surroundings. Even the Bible surprises us with countless stories of people who followed God but had imperfect lives.
Take a look at Peter, Jesus’ disciple. He must have bitterly bemoaned his messy and capricious heart as he wept bitter tears after denying Jesus not once but three times and at the very moment his Lord was being condemned to death by the Pharisees. How his heart must have withered when Jesus looked at him after that third denial. The conviction that must have burned within his heart! The self-doubt! The self-condemnation! Peter had walked beside Jesus for three years, loved him, vowed never to leave him, but in Jesus’ greatest hour of need, he denied that he even knew him.
But Peter—like us—was in process. He’d come from being a rough-speaking fisherman to a follower of Jesus who one moment was adamant in his unfailing love and the next embarrassed and afraid to be discovered as one of his followers. After Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus plied Peter with questions to test his heart, then challenged him to take the keys of God’s kingdom to a lost world. Peter led the charge. He became a leader among the apostles, suffering many times for his steadfast loyalty and courageous preaching about Jesus as the way to salvation. God took his messy heart and turned him into the rock, the foundation for a growing church of believers.
Like Peter, I’m in process. You’re in process. God looks deep within us and sees the good as well as the messy and troublesome parts that with a little prodding can bloom into something beautiful—something He saw there at the beginning of time when He first thought to create us. He has a future and a plan for us that will grow into reality when we allow Him to be the Gardener of our hearts.
© Linda Rooks 2019
“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. . . . It is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” Phil: 1:6 & 2:13
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