While working in my garden one morning, clearing leaves, sweeping paths, weeding plots and cutting back overgrowth, it occurred to me that gardening is an effort towards turning chaos into orderliness.
The chaos comes about when birds and animals (and people!) leave a mess behind them, and plants grow wildly in all directions, and weeds determine to outgrow everything else.
The orderliness is restored when the gardener diligently and carefully works in the garden. If the gardener neglects his work for a few days, the task can become onerous. After a longer delay, the garden may look quite chaotic, and perhaps become too great a job to tackle. The secret is to do ‘little and often’.
A garden might be a good representation of the spiritual lives of Christians. The ‘birds’ and ‘animals’, spiritually speaking, are all those worldly things and worldly people we encounter every day, that mess us up with their bad influences. The ‘plants growing wildly’ represent our spiritual activities, which need to be trained, nurtured and pruned so that they go God’s way. The ‘weeds’ represent the sin in our lives which threatens to take over if we are not careful. Much work needs to be done if the Christian’s spiritual life is not to become chaotic.
How is the work to be done that maintains the orderliness in our ‘garden of life’?
Just like the gardener, you must regularly spend some time on your knees!
Remember, ‘little and often’ is best.