I have been thinking about gardens, it is harvest time. I am not sure how it happened to come so quickly but as I drive around the peace country and crops are down and being taken in, harvest is happening.
I do not have a garden this year. I have some new fruit trees with no fruit yet and some pumpkin plants with maybe 1 pumpkin and zucchini plants that look barren along with a couple rhubarb plants that are doing well, so, maybe I do have a garden. The plants we put into our clay soil with no other preparation just to see how they would do. I have some decent leaves but not a lot of veggies, but we did not expect a big return. Not a big garden, a couple patches of things is how I would best describe it.
God loves gardens. He put the first people Adam and Eve into a garden not because it was just a place, but it was His heart. God loved the garden and thought of all the places in the world to put people, He chose a garden, likely a garden more beautiful than any we could ever imagine.
He laid His Son’s dead body in a garden.
Jesus went to talk to His Father in a garden.
Hope comes from a garden because the tomb was empty in a garden.
The beginning and the end of life, in a garden. Life springs up in a garden.
I stopped by the side of the road to take some pictures of this sunflower field, I felt sad that I had not captured the field earlier when the flowers were not so droopy. I suddenly realized that the farmer is not concerned about the flowers, not at all. He wants the seeds. He wants the seeds for sunflower oil, for sunflower seeds.
Canola farmers want the seeds in the canola, not these beautiful yellow flowers that dot the landscape all around the prairies. They take the dried old stalk of plant that has the seeds attached to it and they dry it in order to collect the seeds.
I thought to myself what if it was the same for us? What if in our life, it is not about us. We spend so much time focusing on us. Our achievements, our wants, our things that make us "beautiful". What if life, is really about our seeds, what we leave behind, our legacy if you will, not necessarily your children. I am talking about the things that will live on after you.
Like a dandelion seed that can catch the wind and spread for miles. What seeds have you planted? What harvest can be expected?
I bought a plant that is considered in some areas to be invasive, it is not in mine but I found this out when I read up on it before I planted it into the ground. The seeds can take over and it is called invasive. Invasive plants and weeds are on a list from the department of agriculture as things we need to pull out, get rid of. Some of them are beautiful. The yellow clematis is on the list. I have had purple clematis and they are gorgeous and the yellow one is too. The yellow one for some reason is invasive.
Some of the things that we need to get rid of in our lives also need to be pulled up and gotten rid of. These things can also seem “beautiful”, good, harmless but just like the beautiful plants that are on the list they can take over our lives and infiltrate the really good stuff. An example…cell phones. People these days are so focused looking down at their phones that they often miss the people standing right in front of them.
What does invasive mean? It means to take over, infiltrate your space. Invasive plants are “harmful non-native trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants that are speared by global trade, human and animal transport and gardening. They invade forests and prevent native plants from growing.”
You know maybe as Christians we need to look at this behaviour. In some things we need to be intentional at pulling up and getting rid of and in other ways we need to be more invasive. Not to take over, rather to infiltrate the land, be the seed that Jesus planted that is free enough to go with the flow, to go with the wind, to drop where Jesus plants you and start growing. As you grow in that spot you produce seeds that will be carried along by the wind of God all over the world. It is certainly something to ponder, isn’t it?