The seeds are planted at the right depth, the right time, in the right fashion.   Careful tending and watering bring an assurance that the sprouts will pop up in 7-10 days.   But you watch, you wait.   At day 14 – still nothing.   You begin to believe something has gone terribly wrong, that the cooler-than-usual weather has destroyed the promise.   You consider running to the store for another package of seeds,  concerned at the time you have lost for the growing season, fairly short in our arid, mountainous region.   Will there even be time for a harvest now?   Another week goes by and daily the barren soil just lies befor you.   You figure there is no choice but to run to the nursery for some established seedlings.   You are taking things into your own hands.

But before you get there on one hot, sunny day, one extremely blazing-hot-sun day, you glance at the patch of garden where disappointment has been and you start to look away, but the tiniest green spot grabs your attention.   And look –  all over: the most fragile and minute seedlings are emerging – just as you had planted them.   They have arrived!   They are here in their glory!   Hope has not been lost.   What the good soil and little seed could not do alone, what watering and watching did not produce immediately, the intensity of the heat of the sun bearing down caused the moisture locked beneath the soil’s visible crust to rise and soften that seed.    And just like Jesus,  from the 3rd day in the tomb, risen!   Indeed!

We work to do it all like we are “supposed” to.   We hide the Word of God in our hearts, we meditate on it.   We allow ourselves to be washed with the water of the Word.   We receive the good seed and we wait and wonder: where is the fruit?   We are devasted at the barrenness in our lives in certain areas.   And sometimes even years after witnessing and declaring  the faithfulness of God, we face yet another opportunity to choose to believe…or not.   There are variables in sowing and reaping.  

And to our dismay, at times, a very hot day in the furnace of affliction becomes the defining moment,  the proof we need that He remains faithful.   In the  fiery brilliance of distress and the cry for relief, we become  a living example, as the “water of the Word,” under fire of affliction, begins to rise up around us consuming us like a sauna, and in that moment of seed-shattering brokenness  – new fruitfulness!   New life!   The thing we longed for – the intensity of the blaze, exposes in us.  

And again, in the bright light of day, we lift our face to the sun and declare: He is faithful!   He is so faithful!

More “Grace from the Garden” for me, I guess.   Everytime I am digging in the dirt (in my little suburban backyard) – God is revealing more of Himself to me.  

What if I lived on a farm!?!…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF/GRACE NOTE:   The fruitfulness in faith required the fire.   He who began  a good work in me, will be faithful to complete it, variables notwithstanding.   That is settled.

pictured: a Google Image

Here is something more  from my personal  “Grace from the Garden,” – messages I get from God while I am digging around in the dirt.

Grace note: The most lush and fruitful growth shows up where the pruning last took place.   The spiritual implications of this are almost frightening.  

I have a love-hate relationship with what we call “shrubbery.”   I love  it because  it creates easy-care interest in the garden and landscape, and I hate, not the bushes, really, but the fact that we must “tame” them for suburbia.   I have 2  purple-leafed Sand Cherries (prunes x cistena)  flanking a  Weigela and have not-so-carefully tended and watched their growth over the past six years.   They have become, truly, almost an embarassment, full and fat (average-growth-4-to-6-foot-width-my-posterior), large and tall (biggest kids on the block).   My “method” has been to let them be what they were created to be, and not shave them back to little boxy geometric sculptures like some of the neighbors have done.   The  Sand Cherries  have rewarded me, in turn, by being a cool reprieve guarding our home  as the hot sun is setting in the west.   They have created a beautiful frame to  the mountain view out my living room window and added rich, deep, purplish-burgandy leaf interest  to a mainly green outdoor vista.   They are one of the first prophetic trumpet-calls that winter is over every year  when they burst and sway under the weight of thousands and thousands of tiny pink blooms each spring.

In short, I like them as they are, but I must prune them and keep them in check for the neighbors’ sake.   And so the  homeowner’s-association-nazis don’t send me a letter.

I ventured out this morning with pruning shears in hand to bushes bowing in the heaviness of growth.   And what did I find?   That the “offending” branches, the ones reaching to places they don’t belong and obstructing the Weigela’s view, the branches threatening to cover the entrance to the house entirely – they were all growing directly from the branches that I pruned last summer.   They were, without apology, shooting in every direction  from something that I had put a stop to, a place where I’d cut.   They had multiplied and become fruitful!   For every one cut last year, 6, 8 even 12 branches had formed in defiance, an ingrained will to live, live like God intended!

So, I pruned a little less lightly than I had intentioned, because I think those bushes are out to defy me, anyway.   And I thought about the concept of growth where the wounding took place.

I am always asking God to make me like Him.   I am constantly reaching toward what it means to be filled with the fullness of God.   I pray, “May Jesus Christ be formed in me.”   Then I cry and freak out at the pain of the pruning.   The pain of the cut has often been severe, almost cruel, it seemed.   I’ve mourned  to see my “fruitfulness,” the giftings and talents and abilities I’d so carefully and proudly presented – chopped off, thrown into the trash pile.

But in truth, the places where I have been pruned – right there next to the wounded and healed stump of the cut, that is where my greatest joy and most  lush growth has come.   That is the place of fullness, freedom and delight,  the place of my greatest faith.   There is life  in those places now, abundant.

I don’t like the thought of going through it again, yet, with regularity, the child God loves, He disciplines.   Jesus said, “He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”   John 15.2 NIV

I once heard Joyce Meyer say it like this: If you don’t bear fruit, God will prune you.   If you do bear fruit, He’ll prune you so you bear more.   So the way I see it is, you’re pruned if you do and pruned if you don’t, so you might as well go ahead and submit yourself to the pruning.  

Here is what I know, at least as often as I need to prune my purple-leafed Sand Cherries, God is probably going to have to prune me.   Maybe more.

Thinned out and leaking a little bit of sap  today…Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: Stay in the process.   Let God finish His work in me.

“…don’t shrug off God’s discipline, but don’t be crushed by it, either.   It’s the child He loves that He disciplines; the child He embraces, He also corrects.   God is educating you; that’s why you must never drop out.   He’s treating you as dear children.   This trouble you’re in isn’t punishment; it’s training, the normal experience of children…”   Hebrews 12.4 The Message

pictures from Google images (just because I was too lazy to take any)

Some “Grace from the Garden,” things I learn about God while I am digging around in the dirt…

Grace Note:   This season will come again (ready or not).

I was asking God, not  with words, but from my heart (and I know He heard me loud and clear), Why do I find myself back here in this recurring place of pain, this particular  area of brokenness for which I have forgiven the best I can and given it to You and prayed and studied and tried to follow  Christ’s example?   Why do I repeatedly respond and react to certain things from such an old place of injury?   How come, after You last  helped me and brought understanding and so much healing, do I find today that I still have further to go?

God immediately drew my attention to a flowering tree of some sort  I planted a few years back (pear? dogwood? crab apple?).   I don’t think I prepared the planting hole well when I got it.   It was an end-of-season clearance, so I got it cheap with kind of a well-if-it-makes-it-good attitude and proceeded to plop it in the ground where it did not have much chance to establish itself before winter. It did not do well.   It barely survived the winter and made a very poor showing in the spring.   I had to coddle it with special watering and food all summer.   The following year, the same.   Very little growth and a very spindly and sickly-looking tree.   I anticipated, though I allowed it to just keep plodding along,  having to begin again in that corner with a different tree.

But this year, there has been a turn.   Somewhere, in someway, it has finally established itself  after almost 4 years in it’s place. It has doubled or tripled in size.   It bloomed profusely this spring and then shot up in height some more.   It is now radiant with health and I think it’s going to bring me much joy in the years to come.

God put that tree in my mind. And then  I am pretty sure I heard Him tell me:   That tree goes through the same four seasons each year.   That is the same tree you planted  4 years ago.   But that tree is not the same this spring as it was the spring before, or the spring before that.   Every year after the time of dormancy (while I, Jeanie,  btw,  always feared  it had finally and truly died), when you’d notice it again, it was the same tree, but the tree was different, not the same.   There are seasons.   You will go through the same season again and again, but each time, you’ll be different.    Sometimes the difference will be below ground, where the roots reach out for what is needed.   Sometimes it will be visible,  branches waving in glory.      It’s just a season.   It’s a season.

Thank-You, God.   I needed that!

So then I guess the answers to my heart’s questions might be:

Q: Why am going through this same thing again?   What is wrong with me?

A: Nothing.   You’re right on track.   It’s a season.   But you’re different this time than during the last season.   It’s a growth-spurt opportunity!

Q:   When will it finally be done, when will I get it?

A:   When Christ is fully formed in you.  

Q:   When will that be?

A:   When you see Him, you will be like Him.

And as I am writing, the strangest thing just came to my recollection.   I named my daughter, Stormie, after Stormie Omartian (the wildly famous prayer author, singer, song-writer, speaker) because when I faced my first adult “storm” (try being a teenage preacher’s daughter, pregnant at a Bible College) I ran across her lyrics to a song I still have never heard, but which impacted me, nonetheless.   Wow, even as I write (and I googled the lyrics and there they were!), God is reminding me that He has been telling me this all along, for 30 years almost:

It’s just a season of the soul.”..Jeanie

NOTE TO SELF: I  am still me, but I am not the same as last time, by His grace and His undying faithfulness.

“Seasons of the Soul” lyrics by Stormie Omartian