Being Made Fruitful

We don’t need to know
What seeds God has planted within us.
We just need to have our soul ready.
He will till it up – perhaps playing havoc – we dread this
He will water it – sometimes with our tears.
He will bring sunshine to it -through our smiles
He will tend the garden of our souls and make it fruitful.
We will just have to watch and see what grows.
God will use our fruits to feed the world.

     Gardening is one of my favorite occupations. It is there that I feel most connected to God. (The other time is when I find a close parking space!) Gardening is therapy for me, I can get lost in it. It sometimes surprises me how big my plants grow, or how small they stay, regardless what the little tag says. I have to dig them up and put them elsewhere else, where they will get the right amount of sun or shade. This moving often wreaks the effect I was trying to create. (Is the is the demon 'control' making an appearance?) I try to keep the flowers fertilized and properly watered. I have seen a saying that says "God laughs in flowers." What stupendous joy he must have felt as he created the Garden of Eden.
    Looking at my beautiful garden makes me smile. I have been known to drive by the front of my house just to look at it! The first year I ever planted flowers, my therapist at the time just smiled and said, "At last you feel like you deserve beauty and wonder in your life." We all deserve beauty in our lives. I think God surrounds us with abundant beauty but sometimes we don't recognize it as such. There are times that my gardening seems like just one more thing to keep up with. That is until I, while walking to get the mail, see weeds and bend down to pluck them out and all of a sudden I am immersed in the task and forgetting the mail.
     When I moved into my current house, I promptly pulled out all the formal landscaping that so defined all the gardens I had had up to that point. My neighbors have kept theirs all pruned and shaped. I was beginning a new life, and I wanted to begin with a new type of garden here. My favorite kind of garden is the "cottage style." This style is one big beautiful mess, with flowers growing over each other mingling their colors and textures and making an artist's pallet of wild beauty. This kind of garden also symbolizes my life up to this point. A crazy, beautiful mess of color, experiences mingling and harmonizing or clashing to make up a feast for the eyes.
     My soul has definitely been plowed under several times, sometimes so deeply I feel like I have lost sight of it. Even so, I have watered it with plenty of tears; friends, children, faith and laughter have spread bright sunshine in even the darkest corners; God tends to it, prunes, fertilizes and weeds it, when I let him. (I HATE pruning.) Flowers (fruits) appears, even when I don't understand why or how or what kind. And I am often blessed that I can help God give out bouquets to others.