Returning then Rest

The dormant things are coming to life, waking up in the warmth of our days.

The sour smell of the Bradford pears and the chorus of birds coming in through the back door remind me this morning that Spring is not only coming but blossoming here. Getting the yard and garden ready for all that spring, summer, and fall will hold is our main task for today.

It’s one thing to know that you have a job to do and it’s another thing to put on your shoes and go do it.

I stepped into the backyard to answer my husband’s questions about where each garden bed should go and re-starting our compost when I looked up at the fence line. We both stood there, hands on our hips, contemplating what will stay and what has to be pruned back or uprooted.

The warmth and the water have started something that is not easy to stop. The vines cover everything and new, infantile trees are reaching for the sun. They are all so beautiful when well placed and tended. But, this morning, they are a mess.

And so am I.

Weeks of overgrowth threaten the margins of my schedule, my mind, my heart, and my home. There is no space left. No breathing room. Beautiful things recklessly reaching across the boundary lines into other spaces in my life.

And just like my garage is full of the tools needed to tend the garden, I am full of the tools needed to tend my life. But have I the will to do it?

We can read book after book, hear sermon after sermon, take seminar after seminar on how to care for ourselves. All the knowing doesn’t become doing without the will to do it.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, they say. It speaks to how fickle the human will can be but also the power it employs. Fickle meaning often changing or going back and forth, as if to say “Where there’s no will, there’s no way” - without the will the way is hard or impassable. The human will is powerful in that it can force a change in the path ahead of us. It can bring us to do what God has given us to do.

In some moments, I feel as the sluggard described in Proverbs 19:24 who puts his hand into the bowl and can’t even bring it to his mouth.  The tasks or state of things can either inspire one to action or to reluctance. Where is the will to lift my hand?  I ask the Lord to lift my hand, in spite of myself.  He is faithful. 

I’ll take an inventory today - What am I doing? Who am I becoming? What has God asked of me? What am I doing to please people? What am I doing for me? Does it all please God? Is it all mine to do?

“Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails. “ -Proverbs 19:21

It’s a returning to lessons hard learned in years past.  This is a moment I feel guilty returning to - time and again having to reassess my state of health in every field.  Why do I feel guilty?  Have I believed a false notion that knowledge and mastery of a skill no longer require practice?  My Spanish degree was hard earned but, these days, I stumble over my Spanish words like my toddler learning to speak.  

Unemployed abilities just turn into memories.  The longer we leave them unpracticed, the less dexterity we have when we pick them back up to use.  

There is no guilt in returning to a state of self-examination and inventory, of reassessment and correction.  After all, we pruned the vines and trimmed the trees in the fall then we stored the tools in the garage. We didn’t sell the tools online or throw them out because this isn’t a once-and-for-all type of work.  

Garden tending is seasonal.  We were created to be seasonal, cyclical beings.  

I refuse the guilt of needing fresh tending and instead will sit with my tools and invite the Gardener of my heart to do His work in me.  Lord, make me a fruitful garden - weeding, pruning, tilling, sowing, and tending. Let’s do this, again.  

“Search me, God, and know my heart;

    test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

    and lead me in the way everlasting.” Psalm 139:23-24