God in the Garden 3. Seeing Beyond

When we arrived at our house and to this garden there were one or two potted leftovers from previous residents. 

They were either flowering or livening up toward that happening.  It was nice to have a garden hose (our previous house didn't have an outside tap) to help them on their way.

One pot, however, looked a lost cause . . .

Looking at the single flower at the bottom and no apparent buds anywhere else it appeared a waste of a good pot.  I made a mental note to get a good plant for it the next year.  But i watered it anyway.

And suddenly in July - over about two days - it turned into this,  A riot of flowers that essentially buries the leaves!

This has helped my in pandemic ministry.  It feels alot like the leafy, productless pot.  But the watering goes on; perhaps obedience, perhaps habit, perhaps desperation, perhaps faithfulness.

May the God who made and cares for the flowers, care for all of his work in the hearts of mankind too.

God in the Garden 2. Hidden Problems

It even surprises me.

When we filmed the Easter Morning pandemic recording in the garden there was the awkwardness of a derelict pond motor cupboard, used by a previous resident to create a flowing water feature.  It is clearly many years into its decay.

'Why,' I wondered, 'have I never fixed it?'   

I ventured my best explanation - that in the summer it was hidden, because in truth I could hardly remember thinking about it in days in the garden over the years.

And so it proved to be.  I simply hadn't realised how totally the greenery in the pond left the old cupboard out of sight and out of mind.  Here it is in the summer:

That is why it is never fixed!

As we thought about at Easter, the reason for the coming and sacrifice of Jesus is because sin is never hidden from Him - it required action.  The reason why humankind can be equivocal about, blase towards or disinterested in the great salvation Jesus achieved is because we simply cover up our sinfulness to ourselves and among ourselves.  It doesn't need fixing, so we don't need Jesus.

This strategy fails to take account of the end of the story - where what God sees is the basis of our eternal accountability.

God in the Garden 1. Life from the Cross

Like Church leaders of all kinds, I spent significant lockdown time broadcasting from the garden.  I'm very blessed, especially in London, to have a garden.

Maundy Thursday - what a long time ago that feels - our family was in lockdown with Covid in the house.  For our online Maundy Communion (watch here) we needed a cross.  As it happened, my wife had made her own from two old garden twigs because she had done her school's online Easter talk.  We used that very stark-looking cross.

When summer came, we sat in the garden in happier circumstances - and one day looked at that cross:

Out of the apparently dead wood was growing a flower.  It is a fantastic picture of the hope that God offers during a dead year, and that he always offers through the cross to the soul who turns his way.

Ivy

I have been pulling out ivy.  I have never planted ivy at any house I have lived in but it has been a constant companion, appearing in just about every garden I have tended.

 

To be honest, I think this is s natural judgment because many years back while living in a bedsit I was given an ivy plant which I planted (undoubtedly contrary to regulations) outside the building.  A few years later I noticed the building façade had turned wholly green and only God and I knew why . . .

 

Ivy is allegedly in some danger of death during English winters but that has never been my experience (unless I do the killing).  It just stays and gets ready to take over more of the garden than it had previously done.  It clings.

 

Edward Bickersteth noticed that too:

 

Ivy, which unsupported would lay on the ground, by clinging can rise high in the air. The more the wind blows, the more it clings to its support and so is safe.  Similarly Christians are linked to God.

Life

The other day we were walking round an amazing landscaped garden.  Water features, wisely placed roses, glasshouses and beautiful shrubs and flower beds adorned the summer scene.  It was very beautiful, even to a relatively untrained eye such as mine.

 

Then there was a startling section.

 

Simply enough, it was left wild and in such a setting it looked quite wrong (in my own garden it would have blended somewhat better!).  That was not what was startling though.

 

It was startling because it was absolutely full of life.  I don't mean that, instead of one flying insect for every 20 flowers there were two.  I mean startling.  Instead of a decent few insects this area was teeming with them, large butterflies and tiny gnat-like insects and all points in between.  Soon I was hardly looking at the somewhat common looking wild flowers but was staring at this flying sea (to mix the metaphor) of life.

 

We have just spent much of a year in 1 Corinthians.  This letter dispels any notion that the Church of the 21st century is in some kind of qualitative decline for there is portrayed a wild church such as even the trendiest, most rebellious of Christian outlaws in the 21st century would find hard to emulate.  More to the point it was wilder than is the Sunday Assembly, the atheist parody of Christian services but is actually more decent than Corinth was.

 

Wild. 

 

But there was life there.  Like the insects he created, God does not seek out human formality and order for its own sake.   He is the author and partaker of spiritual life and if that is in the chaotic meadow it is better to him than a neatly ordered spiritual mausoleum.

Leaves

Ah.  The delights of the English Autumn.

Across the Atlantic this is the Fall.  I think they have a point.

We loved living by the seaside which we did for a number of years.  Then, in English terms, we were called far away from the sea (a hundred miles).  Consolation of a locational kind was hard to come by but I tried. 

"At least we won't get salt on the windows in winter gales!"  In this I have been proved right.

"There's all these lovely trees.  'Leafy Bucks.'  You never get all these trees by the seaside."  This is also true.

Another thing you don't get by the seaside is, therefore, a host of 'lovely trees' dispensing most of themselves on your lawn, driveway and car all in two windy nights.  I repeat - this is not Autumn, it is Fall.

But this is the thing.  Although the trees around our house are approximately the same size each year the number of leaves that I have to set to work on is by no means the same.  And this has been a very easy year.

Our driveway has no gate.  Often when the wind blows it does so  (I have always assumed) at the behest of Wycombe District Council.  Leaves that, in deference to my back, have respectfully fallen on the pavement outside have been blown into my drive for me to have extra work to do.  A man in a vehicle that is a cross between a vacuum cleaner and a dustcart purrs merrily by early some morning with no leaves to work on while the leaves that have escaped him wave sneeringly at him from my drive and then sneeringly at me as I wearily chase them around with a humble non-mechanical broom.

This year the north wind blew.  Everyone was complaining.  Temperatures dropped and leaves fell, winter coats hurriedly located, car heaters turned up, extra bedding for the pets, a general sense of winter arriving.  But me?  I was well pleased.

Somehow the north wind (which blows toward my drive) swirls around the leaves and deposits them back north - onto the property of Wycombe District Council Highways Department and the man in his motorised vacuum cleaner thingy.  I went out of the house, swept a few separatist leaves from a corner by the garage, and retreated in the warm to await the family plaudits for all my hard work.

I had a friend who was a Pastor in the East African Revival.  His spiritual experience was like my yard work experience.  His ministry 'work' was to sit in his room with a queue of people outside his door waiting, one by one, to give their lives to Christ.  I am working on ways of persuading the Holy Spirit to blow from the north.