The Garden

It is pruning and weeding season. That time of year when we as a family go outside more. Not the summer fireworks and water park days but our actual yard and side walk days. The walks and outdoor patios become the main focus for any kind of meet up, the kids bikes become the playdate option of choice and yard days, grilling, bonfires, and lawn chairs come out. For us the yard is used 100X more during fall. The dead of summer is when our yard is abandoned for either the lake, the beach, or the ice cream store. We just let it go…but fall. Fall is for yard work.

The weather gives us a hint of cooler breeze and the windows fly open! It is the season we let the outside in. It is then that time of year to clean up the yard and the gardens. We weed, we rake leaves, we lay mulch, we pick up sticks, we lay stones and edge. We pull poky plants up from their nasty yellow roots. Every fall I pull the last of the summer vegetables out too. I toss old mossy pots and throw away any broken fairy garden parts. I clip back my rose bushes to two feet from the ground before the first frost. I buy mums and marigolds. I think about preparing for spring. 

I go at it like an artist in a deep creative process. A bit erratic and a bit aggressive. Ok maybe a lot aggressive. As, I began this process this year my thoughts went to last year and my life.

Last year it seemed things were being stripped away from my own life like my little patch of earth I cultivate. Pulled, ripped, and clipped faster than I could grasp fully. But Oh, I felt it. Friends fell away. Ones that I thought were extensions of myself (like a trees branches). Certain dreams closed. Opportunities fell through and we even moved ministries/philanthropic endeavorers completely. On top of that, and to be perfectly transparent, we had to weed out some of our financial goals too. as it just wasn’t going to happen.

I knew it was coming. Like a tree seeing the farmer coming at it with the clippers and shovels. I could see God preparing me and yet until it is done – you don’t know the feeling. Like my rose bushes being whacked back, It hurt. 

My life was being clipped back in areas. People, and roles, and ideas were being weeded out, pulled up and pruned off. I felt bare, exposed, and even void in places. The Gift of Rejection in full force and work.

There is a song that spoke right to this:

“Tend the soil of my soul
Break up the fallow ground
Cut back the overgrown
And I won’t shy away
I will let the branches fall
So what You want can stay
And what You love can grow” – Song by Bethel Music and Emmy Rose

My rose bushes? They can be five feet tall by end of summer season, and I chop them back to two feet. So that next season they may be six feet! If I don’t they could die in the frost season or worse be ragged horned bushes only. After I cut them, I know that some of the branches won’t grow back, at ALL. New ones come off of them but, different. I look at it before I do this. I think of the way it will grow out and up and full! I make sure I cut it so as not to have it grow in and choking itself next season. Life is like that too. But it doesn’t mean that the loss of the branches that were do not hurt when they are being cut away. 2023 I felt that.

This year? There are branches that have not grown back in my life, but there are others that have bloomed far, far further than I ever expected. Giant shoots off of what was stripped away. Incredible heights achieved.

This is not to say that growing seasons are not challenging too. My daughter grew six inches this last year. SIX! In one year! She had physical growing pains. Actual aches and pains as her body had to adjust so quickly and I wondered…do plants ache when they grow that fast? Like we do?

Whether you are in the pruning, and weeding season of life or the growing season or maybe still in the dark under the ground there is pain in the process.

“If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution. First, you cannot achieve them without suffering, and second, insofar as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways more painful to you, or at least demanding of you, than you can now imagine. Then why desire to evolve at all, you may ask. If you ask this question, perhaps you do not know enough of joy.” – The Road Less Traveled

But if you let it… you bloom as the flowers, an example of God’s pure living fragrance to the world!

Flowers are mentioned in the Bible a ton in analogies and parables. Vines, Lily’s, Fields of wheat, olive branches, Trees by the river…Scripture calls to the beauty of nature and of their growth. It is in the process of these blossoming blooms that we see inspiration for us to live. To trust in God.

My prayer for you wherever you find yourself in the season of your life/garden is Isaiah 58:11 NIV, Ezekiel 36:36 NIV

11 The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. and …36 Then the nations around you that remain will know that I the Lord have rebuilt what was destroyed and have replanted what was desolate. I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it.’