God the Great Gardener

I am not, as anybody who know me will tell you, a natural gardener.  Alan Titchmarsh I am not.  In fact, when it comes to gardening I’m more of a Jeremy Clarkson in that I’m pretty clueless about the whole thing and have not desire to learn.

However, there was gardening needing doing today and as I’m not currently at college or on placement the lot fell on me.  There were front and back lawns to mow and a leilandi hedge at the back to cut.  The hedge cutting was particularly irksome because it isn’t even ours but was planted by the people behind us much against our wishes; but it had grown out over our garden to such an extent that there was no option other than to do some serious pruning.

I decided to tackle the bigger job, the hedge, first.  Cutting the lower parts was easy with a pair of very sharp long handled shears, but then I had to balance precariously on a rickety wooden step ladder cutting the higher branches.  Finally I had to climb on the shed roof to get at some branches that were overhanging badly, but eventually it was all pruned.  I stood back and realised how much better the hedge looked now, how much more pleasing it was to the eye.

On to the lawns, a job I always find mind numbingly boring, on par with watching paint dry or waiting for the kettle to boil when desperately in need of a cup of tea.  An hour later the job was done and again a reflection on how much better both lawns looked after they’d been mowed.

There was nothing technically wrong with either the hedge or the lawn before I cut them, both were growing as God had designed and made them to do and both were flourishing; but how much better they were with intervention from me as the pruning and cutting not only males them look better to others but also encourages new growth.  Especially in the case of the hedge cutting out the dead wood encourages new growth and helps the plant to flourish.

Sometimes I think that God gives us a good pruning.  There are bits of us that are great, that are formed by God through the power of the Holy Spirit, bits of us that are good and right and true.  Then there are the bits that aren’t so good, the dross in our lives, the things that lead us away from Him; the sinful, selfish things we think, say and do.  These things God gently and lovingly prunes from our lives.  Sometimes we resist this pruning and try to hang on to things in our lives that we really are better off without; but eventually we need to let God have his way if we are to be the best we can be; because without that pruning we cannot grow into the wonderful Christ-like people God wants us to be.

God loves us just as we are, it is true; but he loves us too much to leave us the way that we are.