Garden Spirituality

from Elliott
I do 'hear' God a bit better than normal while working in the garden. Today I was thinning the carrots...it seems that my seed was much more productive than I was expected and I ended up with extremely dense seedlings! On the one hand I was overly proud that they had done so well but I realized what looked like lush growth was actually going to choke them out and they would never grow to full size.

The only way to give them the proper growing room would be to remove about every third one - but which ones should I remove and what should I do with them? I could not just remove the weakest ones since they all looked the same above the ground. What was different though was the invisible growth below the surface. I paused wondering if I was going to be wasting some good ones since I would just be picking them at random.

It reminded me of spiritual pruning - when God removes that part of each one of us that is not of His plan and hinders our growth. We too might look like the lush row of carrots on the outside to our peers but God knows that not all is well with our soul and that we have too many things 'crowding out' the person that God has created us to become.

Of course, many times those things needing pruning are not always visible to us or other people much like the portion of the carrots that lie beneath the surface. But nothing is invisible to God so as a loving Gardener He goes about removing that which hinders our growth. And while the process might appear in the short term to reduce us or challenge us as the season unfolds new growth occurs and, like the carrot, we take on the appearance that the Gardener had originally intended- achieving our fullest potential!