To know and love God more fully and to encourage others to do the same

October reflection

I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. John 15:1

I am not a gardener myself.  I appreciate the garden, I quite like to have a wander around or sit down in it.  I don’t mind helping to harvest what my husband has grown, but if it was left to me, it probably wouldn’t be much of a garden.

Although I am not a gardener then, having married someone who is, I have begun to learn a few things.  Gardens can come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.  Some are more formal, others less so, but none of them have to be perfect.  Sometimes things will work really well, other things won’t and that may change from year to year even.  Garden beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.  We still laugh at the friend whose favourite part of our garden was the bit we did nothing with!

Whatever works for you when it comes to gardening though, there is always a sense of rhythmn and pattern.  There are things that the grass and plants need to grow and flourish such as water, sunlight, the right soil and that will change depending on what is growing.  Some plants need to be left to do their own thing, others need cutting back.  Different seasons will bring different colours and textures to the garden and quite often there are suprises.  The unsown seed that suddenly burst forth.  The plants that should have grown easily, but somehow haven’t.

And isn’t that how life can be?  Different people with different ways of growing and nurturing needing different things at different times.  A delicate eco-system that gives space to the wild and rambling as well as the ordered and systematic.  Yet all are in the hands of our gardening God.  A gardener who brilliantly, awe-inspiringly, works so many different elements into the one glorious garden through the true vine who is Christ Jesus.  Jesus who, John 15 goes on to tell us, calls us to be fruitful as we love one another.  Sounds like my kind of garden.

Gardening God, today we pray that you continue to connect us to true vine so that your garden may flourish wherever we are.  Amen.

Every blessing, Lorna