Hey, Pastor John!
I’ve been meaning to write out this testimony from last week! I think about it a lot and I’ve told various people and I just love how it feels. A couple of months ago now, we finally bought a large bunch of flowers to landscape the front of our house. I placed them how I wanted them, dug a hole, put them in the ground, watered them some (maybe once or twice a day), then watched them ALL die, less than a week later (I am not a gardener). A week after I planted them, we had Uncle Bob come over to till up the ground at our front corner for a nice little area for flowers and our boulder from Paul. Those flowers and grass have been there now for over and month and they are beautiful. Looking at them, I realized the difference…we hadn’t tilled up the soil in front of our house.
So two weeks ago, we took back the dead flowers, and I got all new ones. But this time, before I planted them, we tilled up the ground really well and deep, and added some cow manure and fertilizer mixed in. The ground was so soft and easy that it didn’t take much to make a hole and put the plant in. The afternoon that I finished planting them, that’s when we had the 3 1/2 days of solid rain. I was thankful for the rain to give my plants something to drink and live by! It’s been two weeks and they are doing just fine. The difference was the care we gave the soil!
Jesus let me see a parallel between that situation and real life! We have to do something! We have to do our part, then let God have it. That first lot of plants got full sun since the day they were planted, but the second lot (when done right) got days of rain to establish them. That was God. It was as if God was saying, “Ok, you’ve done your part, now it’s mine.” 🙂 We have to care for the soil that we are in. We have to pray, read our Bible, pay attention to what and who we are listening to, what we spend our time doing, what manners and attitudes we have with people, etc. All of that is fertilizer to our soil. We have to do something!
The best part, though, was that Jesus showed me that you can change the soil to make it better! I did it wrong the first time and didn’t care for it as I should (maybe a bit lazy), but we got a second chance to do it right, and it turned out perfect. nAfter those days and days of rain, some may say that too much rain might not be such a good thing… but it was in God’s hands anyway! That wasn’t my business. I did my part and the rest was up to Him. That takes the burden away of having to do it by yourself. God knows just what we need, and when we do things the right way to tend to our soil, He’s going to finish the rest. But you have to help keep it up as well, and watch for weeds and fertilize every once in a while. It’s not “once planted, always planted”. Good soil takes work.
I love being able to slow down in this crazy and hectic life to learn things from Jesus. How merciful he is for second chances!
Leah