What I learned from my garden...

What I learned from working in my garden this year

This year was is our first Spring in the Westbury rectory.  For as long as Sara and I have been married, Spring has been a time of planting annuals.  It took me a few years to appreciate it, but each year that I enjoyed the wild explosion of color the more I took pleasure in the planting process.  This year we didn't have much space for planting that was "ours" so I asked the church's landscaper to turn over a section of ground around the fence in our "back yard" that Sara and could turn into a garden.  As I worked to finish the preparation of the ground, I was overtaken by the way that God had worked the same way in me over recent years.  Here are some insights about how He works that I gleaned from a couple of hours working in the dirt.

The first thing to remember for me is that the grass that was there had its place.  It helped to keep weeds at bay, and it kept the mud from getting all over our shoes.  It even kept the yard looking "nice" while it waited to blossom.

I had a lot of "grass" in my life when God started in on me.  It had served a purpose.  It held me together when I didn't know anything better.  It even (at least on the surface) kept me looking fairly presentable.  The grass in my life is not to be despised.  When I was growing into manhood, grass was all I learned, and God accepts that, but He dreams of more for me.  (And for you.) 

 

Grass in our lives is a web of lies that we use to hold our world together.  Some of them are things we even call "common sense."  Some are small, some are huge.  Some of the largest lies are ones that we don't even know we've chosen for ourselves.  They live so deep in us that we can't see them without help. (the "roots") 

Here are some of the "grass-lies" that I bought into:

"God helps those who help themselves."

First of all, find that one in the Bible.  I dare you to try.  You'd waste the rest of your life looking if you did.  God doesn't help those who help themselves.  He helps those who lean on His love and His providence.  What benefit is there for God or for us if God only helps those who will think they did it on their own when it's all over?  Does God benefit from renewed and strengthened relationship with His children?  Do we benefit from help that we will inevitably mistake for the results of the "strength of our own arms?"  This lie serves to separate us, not join us to God.  It returns us to the center of our own universes and turns failure from an opportunity to to God into a demand that we just try again and try harder.  It creates a life of infinite striving and no peace at all.

"I'm responsible for what happens in my life."

This one is almost another version of the first, but it carries a more insidious threat.  When we succeed, the glory is ours, not God's.  When we fail, we find ourselves worthy of blame and humiliation.  It's the old "carrot and stick" motivator.  This isn't to say that we do not have a say in what happens in our lives.  We do, especially to the extent that we release the results of our efforts to God's faithfulness.  Our lives are full of the echoes of our poor decisions, and our good ones.  What this lie adds to the whole mix is the credit/blame balancing act.  All the blame for my poor choices went with Jesus to the Cross.  All the credit for my good choices goes to the Father who makes those choices possible in Jesus.  It leaves me free to exert myself fully, in joy.  I will surely stumble, but not so as to fall! 

"I'm too sinful to be lovable, so I'd better find some other way to be worthwhile."

This is one of those lies that uses just a bit of the truth to give itself some extra "sting."  It is based in a truth that most of us have been taught not to acknowledge.  The truth is that we are all so mired in sin that we cannot ever hope to merit the Father's love.  But it is a lie that we can never hope to enjoy that love.  This is a lie that "good" people don't deal with until their house of cards falls in, but it is a falsehood that all of us tell ourselves in the darkest corners of our souls.  The lie is not that we are sinful, but that we had better find some other way to be "worthwhile."  An immeasurable number of "good deeds" have been done by injured souls vainly trying to bandage their wounds with the results of "selfless" acts of mercy.  These folks usually learned too early of their powerlessness in the face of a sinful world and have been trying to compensate ever since.

Of course, the true second half of that sentence is not "so I'd better..." but rather, "so He sent His only-begotten Son, so that all who believe (put their trust) in Him might not perish, but have everlasting life."  I am too sinful to be lovable, so I'll trust in His mercy instead. 

The lie is a much more difficult one to kick than most of us realize.  Either we dodge our depravity and helplessness in the face of sin ("I'm not really all THAT bad..) or we just can't get over that last hurdle to truly trusting in His mercy.  God spent a lot of time shaking these roots loose in me, and probably still has a ways to go.

"It's up to me to defend the weak."

This is a lie that I bought into for a long time.  Of course, there's the opposite lie, "It's up to each person to lift herself/himself from the mire."  I guess I bought into that one too, at least as far as I was concerned.  I wasn't worth dragging out of the difficulties I'd created for myself, but I was sure gonna try to make sure no one else had to feel that way. 

It is true that God permits me to participate in His work to lift up those who have been cast down by life or by their own sin.  I am privileged to be a co-laborer in the restoration of His children.  But it's not up to me.  When I do think it's up to me, I get angry and frustrated, and I find myself prone to casting down others in order to raise up those who are currently among the fallen.  And because I cannot even begin to fathom His purposes, many times I will insist on raising up those in whom the abyss is still doing its work, long before God is ready for them to come up higher. 

"What I've known is all I can really expect in the future.  Real change can't happen.

This lie is perhaps the most destructive and deadly of all sins.  The real name of this demon is despair.  You see it in the deadened eyes of the people you pass on the street every day.  They may have a certain fire of excitement in their gaze as they anticipate the next "thing" they'll acquire to deaden their awareness that their worlds are essentially empty, but behind the excitement still coils the serpent of despair.  Nothing will ever fill that emptiness, at least, nothing that they know about, and their happiness is wooden, their joy brittle.

It is more obvious of course, in the eyes of the ones whose lives hold no promise at all.  They have watched life swallow their hopes, their dreams, even their children have become sacrifices to the Moloch of this age.  No matter how hard they try, life will never get any better.  Those of us who know Jesus still fall into this from time to time as we discover that we've fallen back into old sins.  The serpent begins to whisper, "See, you can't really escape.  You'll never be different.  Your life will never be any better.  Not really."
 

And then there's the opposite lie...

"If we just work harder, we can turn the world around."

This lie is one that is closely tied to the one that says it's up to each person to rescue himself/herself.  It is one that has had a long and successful run in the United States because for a long time there was always some new land to grasp, some new resource to exploit.  As long as there was something new and unclaimed it seemed possible that every single person might find a piece of something by which to create a "successful" life.  Most of the arable land in our country is being used by someone.  There aren't many unexplored oil fields left.  Only technology offers the promise of unlimited expansion now, but you have to have access to very expensive education to go exploring in that region.

But still some of us think that if we just do more of what we did to get ourselves here, and do it harder than we did before, we can turn things around.  In our families, this often works out to something like, "If we could just go back to the way our parents or grandparents did things..."  If only we could work the old values a little harder...  In the twelve step programs, they call that insanity.  Doing the same thing over and over in hopes of getting a different result.  Jesus called it being blind, having no eyes to see or ears to hear.  God can turn things around, but only He can, and our surrender to His will is our only real hope.

"Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire."

They accused Jesus of doing this, casting out Beelzebul by Beelzebul.  Sometimes we think that, at least for a time, we have to give in to the world's ways of doing things, just to give ourselves some space in which to live out our Kingdom values.  Because the world grasps at things in order to survive, I too must grasp, just to have enough so that I can share the Father's Word.  I can try to "limit" my grasping, but I have to grasp at something! 

Because the world works on a system of blame and honor, I have to give in to that, at least a little bit.  There have to be some things that it's okay not to forgive.  I can hold on to my bitterness.  Only in a few very special instances, but there are just some things that are unforgivable.  Of course, I may find myself on the wrong end of one of those things, and many times we do, at least secretly.  I know I did.

 

Every one of those statements is a lie.  Not a mistake, a lie created by the prince of lies to keep me from knowing the joy of living in full relationship to Jesus.  And humankind has bought into every one of them in some way or another so that we teach them to our children as though they were truth.  (At least, I did.)  There are dozens of others, and each of the ones I named has a dozen different disguises, too.

Grass doesn't blossom.  It doesn't flower.  It doesn't produce any fruit, and God wants so much more for me than just a smooth green surface.  It's one thing for my grass to keep mud off other people's shoes, but I am called to be a feeder of His people.  I am intended to bloom, to draw others to Jesus by the beauty of the blossoms with which He clothes me.  "Grass" lies don't do that.  They keep stuff "presentable" but they don't produce any of the fruit God desires, and they even choke out the flowering plants God wants to plant in me.

And so when I was ready, God had a "landscaper" turn over the grass.

If you're a nice yard of grass, and someone comes at you with a shovel, turning great clods of your earth upside down, that "landscaper" probably doesn't look much like a servant of God.  My "landscaper" surely didn't.  Landscapers have no real interest in the land they're turning over.  They don't even know or care whose will they're doing.   Their indifference to us as they turn our lives upside down is startling.  It feels violent, violating.  They use brutal tools that cut and hurt, and they leave things pretty much a mess.

At least, that's what the landscapers did with my garden.

They turned over the ground that I'd marked, but that's all they did.  They took shovels and turned the grass upside down, leaving great, lumpy clods that were utterly useless for planting anything at all.  The grass was no longer visible.  It looked like fertile earth, but it was so uneven and so full of the grass that had been there before that I couldn't have planted a petunia if my life had depended on it.

I'm amazed at this part of the puzzle, but it seems to hold true that as long as our "grass" holds up we'll refuse the Lord's invitation to grow something better until the "landscaper" comes.  It pains me to see others do what I know I did, as they refuse to invite Him to uproot the grass Himself, and condemn themselves to the ministrations of the "landscaper." 

Be sure of this.  God will send the landscaper.  His love, His will is irresistible.  He will not leave in place a web of lies that prevent you from knowing His joy.  Sometimes the landscaper turns over our carefully tended lives, other times he goes to work on our children, or our parents, but our system of lies will be turned on its head sooner or later. 

Here's a key.

When my life got turned upside down, all the grass was still there.  If I had not had someone there to hold up the possibility of being a wholly different kind of fruitful garden, I would have stubbornly turned that grass around and pushed it back to the surface until I was all green again.  Perhaps a bit less even than before, but my nakedness would have been hidden again.

"Landscapers" don't do the backbreaking work of removing the grass from the earth.  (At least, not the ones who did my garden!)  In our lives, there may be some who turn us over whose love for God is deep enough that they can also take up the next part of the task, but my experience is that the ones with enough compassion to stick with the hard work of removing the grass are too gentle to wield a shovel.  And even those who wield a shovel for God's sake are usually not gifted with the patience and discernment to take up the second phase.

So after the intial "turning over" of the land, there is still a lot of work to do before the garden can flower. 

In my garden, as in my life, there was a lot of hidden grass just waiting for an opportunity to grow back to the surface.  I picked up one of the clods of upside-down grass and was about to toss it in a wheel-barrow to get rid of it when I realized that there was still a great deal of good earth caught up in the roots.

I had a choice.  I could do the quick thing and just toss it all out together, or I could take each clod and remove as much of the good earth as I could before tossing out the clump of grass.  If I had taken the first course my garden would have started out an inch or two lower than the surrounding yard, so much of the dirt was caught up in those roots.  I decided to take the time to save as much of the good earth as I could. 

There is much in you and me that has the potential to bear fruit, but that is so tangled in the sub-surface system of lies we've accepted that we can't get rid of the "grass" without risking much that God would like to use.  God isn't in a hurry.  He has as much time as it takes to prepare us, and though we may grow impatient with the process, His timing is always perfect.  He takes the time to lift each clump of lies that we offer to him and examine it, shaking loose as much that is fertile as we'll let go of so that He can use it.

I was on hands and knees for hours.  He has been working in me for years.  My back was sore, and my hands shaky, but I took such pleasure in the saving of the earth that I hardly noticed the time.  Imagine His pleasure as He receives your lies and shakes them until He's saved all that He wants for you!  Our cry, "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!" (Psalm 139:23) Is our invitation to Him to seek out another clod, another clump of untruth and separate it from what is capable of bearing fruit.  He is overcome with joy to hear this request, and to respond with care and persistence.

One thing I noticed as I worked my way around the fence.  With some clods it was a lot easier to shake out the good stuff than with others.  The easy ones were the dry ones.  When the earth was dry and crumbly it didn't cling nearly as stubbornly to the roots as did the moist stuff.

As I reflected on this, I thought about the "dry" times in my life, of which there have been many.  I wonder now how often I have missed the blessing in a dry time because I didn't know that these were times when it would be easier, less stressful, to let God shake out the good stuff from the "roots" of my lies.  Until very recently in my life, I could not have entered into a dry season with the prayer, "Search me, O God!" I could not have seen this time as anything other than God's absence.  I might have seen it as a time that "sharpened" my hunger for Him, but not one that would also make it easier for Him to work something new and fertile in me.

Another thing I learned as I cleared my garden was that it was more effective at times to use a tool to remove what was desirable from what needed to be tossed away.  No matter how I shook the clods sometimes, the roots clung stubbornly to the dirt that I wanted to preserve.  Shortly after beginning, I came across a large stone that had a big, pointy corner  on it.  I discovered that by beating the clods on the stone I could remove much, much more of the dirt from the roots than I had before.

When I couldn't tell the difference between myself and my lies, the rocks that God used to separate what He wanted from what He wanted to toss out felt pretty brutal at times.  But God knew the difference, and He persisted until He'd shaken loose all that He could from the grip of my lies.  Sometimes these "rocks" were the words of a friend who spoke truth into my life, even when it hurt.  I think that this is an indispensable kind of "rock" in our lives.  Without a "circle of accountability" it is just too easy to hang on to my lies, or to toss away what is valuable with what is not. 

Sometimes His rocks were His Scriptures.  I am often frustrated with the way that my church chops up the Bible to make it more palatable on Sunday mornings.  It is true that many of the people in church do not know how to read the Bible, and that these texts can and will make us wildly uncomfortable if we cannot read with the Spirit's help.  All the more reason to hold our feet to the fire of His Word, so that the lies that make It hurt can be exposed. 

Another of the "rocks" he has used in my life of late is a book.

Well, it's not just a book.  It's a way of living and growing in Christ that's been put in book form.  This book has been very important in my walk, and it's one I strongly commend to you.  It is entitled Emotionally Healthy Spirituality .  This isn't a book to pick up and read on your own.  It is a book to read in the context of a group of Christian friends who will covenant to walk together through the process the book lays out.  This is the beginning of that "circle of accountability" that I mentioned above.  I have worked my way through that book twice.  Once alone, and once with a group, and there just isn't any comparing the two experiences.  If you are led to allow God to use this "rock" in your life, I pray that you'll do it in community.

One last bit of insight I got from my time preparing my garden.

I got my hands really dirty.  I got the dirt from the garden under my fingernails, and I loved it.  This was my garden, my dirt, my fertile soil. 

I also got my hands a little bloody. There were a few pottery shards in the dirt, and one or two bits of glass.  I cut my hands a little, and left a bit of my blood behind in the dirt.

I know that my Jesus didn't treat my dirt as "dirty."  I know that he loved taking on the flesh of which I am made (remember, "Adam" is derived from the Hebrew word for dirt!).  I also know that it wasn't something He did with impunity.   He doesn't enter into my life, or your life, without the cost of compassion.  He doesn't wear work gloves to keep himself pure or safe.  He wades in with bare skin to touch and to heal and to work.  If there are blisters to be had, He'll bear them.  If there are sharp edges in us that cut Him, He accepts that as well.  We may perceive it in the present, as He works His healing in our lives, but all those shards left their scars on the Cross.

These days, I'm pleased to see the beginnings of the fruit He means for me to bear.  This piece is one bit of that.  Looking back on the shovels, and the shaking, and the "rocks," I wouldn't change a thing. 

My garden's just getting off the ground, and I'm looking forward to the joy that it will bring me this year, too.

And He is looking forward to the joy that His work in me will yield.

Jeff

 

 

 

Comments

[nancy]

Thank you for sharing so richly, Jeff. You have given us a treasure trove of resources.