Come to the Garden

Dear Lord,

Show me your beauty. Help me to appreciate your beauty and peace.  A place of God’s beauty and peace.

I don’t have a garden. I cannot plant one.  I am not even allowed to have a houseplant.  But I can “Come to the Garden Alone” where Jesus can “walk with me and talk with me and tell me I am His own.” Plant a garden in your heart, Cynthia.  You can decorate it with every beautiful plant you want.  You can grow fruit there.  The fruit of my Spirit. PEACE, JOY, LOVE, GENTLENESS, PATIENCE, SELF-CONTROL.  All these grow in my garden.  And I give them to you to enjoy and for others to see in you. Feast on my beauty…it will become yours.

          When people look at you, they will not see your worry, fear, or anxiety. They will see my fruit.  I know you have a mental illness that plants this anxiety in you...but I and my gifts are greater and more powerful than that illness...just as I am more powerful than your pain.  You don’t need to get rid of those challenges because I’m working a greater work in you despite them.  I will overcome their power—it is not in my plan to remove them.  It is my plan to be greater in you than those illnesses are.

          How? Meditate on me and my beauty.  Let them fill you.  Look at pictures of my world and my people in that world…see ME in them.  And Love me by loving them.  See the greatness of my power—even in a storm.  And learn to rest securely in my powerful hands.  The same hands that create hurricanes hold YOU.

As you feast your eyes on me, my beauty and peace will radiate from you. People will see me when they see you.  They will notice you look different today than you did the last time they saw you.  You will have been in my garden and my fragrance will emanate from you.

“My soul will rest in your embrace for I am Yours and You are mine” “I am yours and you are Mine” Oceans – where feet may fail

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I know I have not written in a while.  God has some things cooking on a back burner...but until I wrote this a couple of days ago - I had nothing to say except to write another post talking about my pain and medical issues.

I'm tired of that- and I know you probably are also.

Since I wrote the above and have been exchanging emails with a good friend about this topic, I have been cogitating on the idea that we, our hearts, are God's garden.  Is  your inner garden full of weeds; cracked, dry earth; thistles and poison ivy?  Have you been neglecting tending to your garden of prayer?

Is it possible to be reading/memorizing God's Word and praying, and have a neglected garden at the same time? I believe it is--if the words stay in your head and your prayers originate in your head.  Your garden is deeper down--it's in your heart.  You have to listen from your heart for the voice of the Gardener.  You have to let his words burn like brands on your heart.  You have to pray with focus and by putting the urgency and love from your heart behind your prayers.

 It is the Gardener's job to make things grow and to dig up fresh soil...to fertilize, to water your garden, and to pull up weeds.  BUT you must unlock the door to the garden and invite him in to work where work needs to be done.  It is YOUR job to grow and bloom.  That is the work of the flowers and fruit in response to the work of the Gardener.  Let the Gardener love you. Bloom for him.  Walk with him in the cool of the garden in the evening--like Adam and Eve did before the serpent came and wrecked things. Talk to him.  He's waiting for you to open the garden gate and to let him come in and make you fruitful and to give you all you need to grow.