Beauty surrounds us, but we usually need to be walking in a garden to know it - Rumi
It was a lovely bright sunny day yesterday and so I spent the morning in the garden. It is a riot of colour at the moment with the yellow daffodils and white narcissus waving their heads in the breeze, a cold breeze but still it was good to be outside. The pale pink camellia is showing buds which will be out soon whilst the primroses and primula make a fine show along the borders. The hawthorn bush has put on her new white dress for the occasion and Mr Robin is sitting there watching for any worms I may dig up. And then there are those wretched weeds! The little thugs are strangling some precious young plants we have been nurturing; so out with them!
At this point you might expect me to go on about how those weeds represent our sins which strangle the good we do and if left to their own devices destroy the beautiful garden that is our true selves. And that is a valid point, we must take control of those weeds, those ugly words and actions that mar our lives and cause untold hurt to others. However, I have been reminded that weeds are only plants in the wrong place so that whilst they may appear to have no place in the cultivated suburban garden nevertheless in the wildflower meadow they outshine anything that grows in my plot. ‘Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.’ Luke 12:27 NIV And, of course, ecologists tell us that a wild untended patch in our otherwise neat and tidy garden will encourage wild life and all sorts of useful insects, bugs and birds. So perhaps the weeds are not such a nuisance after all. In any case God created the buttercups and the nettles just as He did the daffodils; giving each a purpose, a job to do. Maybe we should look at them as an illustration that God loves all His Creation, weeds as well as cultivated plants. In the same way He loves us, warts and all, whatever size, shape or colour we may be; whatever we have done in our past life. What a wonderful thought that is! Now all we have to do is to hold on to that thought, to follow His commandments, to grow strong and sturdy in the faith so that through our lives and actions the world may see in us the beauty of His Creation.
1 Comment
Steve Givens
30/3/2015 03:11:55 pm
I am so READY for spring to fully kick in around here. I'm not much of a gardener, although I try, but it is the wildflowers I see on my walk that mostly catch me ye, it seems. The beauty of the unplanned, unmanicured wild is a sure sing of God's equitable love for us all...
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AuthorI am an Authorised Local Preacher in an Anglo Catholic parish church, in the Diocese of Essex UK Archives
February 2022
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