Come to the Garden

by Connie Cavanaugh

July 2010

If you are a Canadian, you love spring and summer. Even if you love hockey and skiing and sledding and skating as I do, the charm of spring and summer is irresistible. The longer and colder the winter, the more you long to smell warm dirt and see the color green and hear the birds. Every fall I feel a tad annoyed as I hear the honks of those traitorous geese fleeing to warmer climes while we wingless ones tough it out below. “Fair weather friends!” I holler, shaking my fist at the retreating geese while I button my coat to my chin, pull my hat down over my ears and get ready for the Big Chill.

Since I live in the eastern shadow of the Rocky Mountains, spring comes later here than for most of “inhabited” Canada (90 percent of our population lives close to the 49 ^th parallel). We don’t plant our gardens until May and we don’t dare transplant our annual flowers until mid-June. We have lost thousands of flowers to frost over the years by gambling on nature and losing.

The old adage “April showers bring May flowers” was not written after observing spring in my neighborhood let me tell you! Typically we don’t get our showers until late May and on into June when a typical day will begin and end with crisp cool clarity but deliver a rollicking thunder storm every mid-afternoon. Huge black thunderheads come charging over the mountains and dump buckets of icy rain on our tiny bedding plants whose leaves are usually purple from shock until July. Only the hardiest varieties survive and eventually flourish. That is, until the hailstorms in August pummel them to shreds!

Every year I pray that my delicate little apples won’t get battered and bruised by hail before they have a chance to ripen and every year, that prayer goes unanswered. Ditto for my lettuce and spinach that is standing up in rows like a proud army on parade until the hail shreds the leaves and scatters bits everywhere so the garden looks like New Orleans after Katrina. Ahhh, gardening. Gotta love it! Even though planting and tending a garden in this tenuous climate is fraught with risk and occasional disappointment, we still do it. Why? Because there is new life and much healing to be found in the garden.

I cannot count the times I have left my desk with my shoulders in knots and my head hurting – thinking always makes my brain ache – and stumbled out to the garden like a lost wayfarer looking for a desert oasis. Once there, I’ll look around until I see a weed. I pull it. And then I see another, and pull it. And then I taste the lettuce, Mmmm. Nice. So I break off a leaf of spinach, blow the dirt off and shove that in my mouth too. Yum. Pretty soon I’m gnawing on a green wrap fashioned from chives, herbs and edible flowers rolled up in lettuce leaves. Like a goat, I crawl around on all fours munching my way up and down the rows, pulling weeds, thinning carrots, moving flowers around. If I still have the headache, I don’t notice it. My shoulders un-knot. And I feel God smile.

“Thank you,” I often whisper when I have been on my knees in the dirt long enough to forget the trials of daily living and feel His healing, restoring love. Nice picture, eh? What about the other eight months of the year when it’s too cold to “Come to the garden alone” as the old hymn says?

I have a little room in my house with one window facing east. I go there each morning while it’s still dark with my little pot of tea and get comfortable. With my Bible and whatever study guide I am using at the time I begin to “crawl around”. I have to pull a lot of “weeds” as problems, concerns and daily plans try to distract me from my “gardening time”. And I nibble as I go, enjoying the flavors of His life-giving Word.

Today, I was finishing up Session Nine of a fabulous new Bible Study by Kathy Howard called God’s Truth Revealed. I read, “Do you desire to be near God, in His presence? If so, express your desire by writing a prayer below.” I reread the Scripture I had been studying moments earlier: Colossians 1:22: But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him.

I began to write, expressing my gratitude to Him for making a sinner like me holy and setting me apart for Him to use. I thanked Him for calling me faultless; something only possible because He has forgiven my countless sins and faults. Then I looked at that word blameless and paused. “How can You call me blameless when I have been guilty of so much?” I wondered. At that moment, the sun broke through my window with a light so intense I felt it through my closed eyes.

“You are blameless and pure,” I heard in my soul. Bathed in light, I dared not move, too filled with awe and gratitude to want to open my eyes and end the moment.

There is healing in the garden and our Father calls us to meet Him there each day all year round. If you come to Him, He will feed you with His Word and water your soul with His love. He will “weed” out ideas and behaviors that keep you from flowering. And you will feel the joy of sitting in His bright shadow. Come to the garden.