Gardening...

Have spent an exhausting three days working with my boys in my garden. It has been neglected for quite a while now. I’d like to say probably a year, but the truth is, I’ve not done a great deal there since I started training for my Diploma – and that was 2002! Without Chris mowing the lawn regularly, we would have a jungle at the back of our house.

But we are having some folk around for a party to celebrate our Silver Wedding in 5 weeks time, so the heat is on to sort it out. Now, my garden is 90 feet long, and about 30 ft wide, so there’s a lot of it. When we moved here (13 years ago) the previous owner was a brilliant plants woman, and the shrubs she chose have done very well. But they have become overgrown, and needed serious attacking. I am exhausted, but as I was finishing off one of the long beds this evening, a few thoughts struck me – so I’ll probably share them over a few blogs.

The main problem has been brambles, and we’ve got loads of them. They have grown up in, through, over and behind many other shrubs, and I’ve had to cut back much of the shrubs themselves to get them out. My forearms are a mass of cuts, where the thorns have fought back. But I quickly realised that I could just snip off the sections of bramble I could see, and the shrub would look OK, or I could do the more difficult part, and trace the bramble back to it’s root, and cut it out. As I did so, each shrub looked like it had taken a bit of a battering. But Chris commented, “Mum, it’s opened the whole garden up.” And he’s absolutely right

Pat’s Thought for the day:
We can allow Christ to strip away the surface problems of our life, and look reasonably OK. But if we allow him to get right inside of us, and deal with root attitudes and sins, it will probably hurt a lot, but be oh, so worth it in the end.

And Christ already bears the battle scars required to get to the root of anything in our lives ...