“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things! —Galatians 5:22-23(NLT)
Where I live in the Northeast, deer are everywhere. They’ve overrun my neighborhood to the point where few people even bother to plant anything around their homes. The deer just eat it all to the ground. If you google “Stop deer eating your plants” you get over 11,000,000 hits. But I live for my garden, and my wonderful husband knows this. So many years ago, he got me a fence. It’s a six-foot-high stockade type with one gate, and it keeps out the deer. Also, since they can’t see what’s on the other side, they won’t jump over it. Now my flowers and vegetables are safe.
I love my garden. It’s my favorite place to be. Even time at my vacation home on the lake in Canada can’t compare with the joy I feel when I’m in my garden.
I love to look around, to plot and plan. What to plant where? Which sections should I pave with worn stones? Where would the trellis do the most good, and should I get a fountain?
I have stone sculptures to place, and seeds to buy, and what if I painted some of the fence? So many choices and so many ways to go.
But always I follow a few guiding principles: walk lightly on the soil, treat the garden gently, be thankful for the rain. I use no chemicals. I kill bugs only if absolutely necessary. And always, as I work and nurture, I pray and sing.
I try to let the same principles guide my heart, too. After all, the heart is like a garden: without practical daily maintenance, everything goes to weeds and chaos. Only a well-tended garden produces fruit. A neglected garden yields weeds, thorns, sharp-edged grasses that cut at my fingers, and damp ugly corners where nothing will grow.
But if I do the hard work, the garden produces results. If I do the work, I will be pleased with the results. The same is true of my faith.
Meditation, silence, study–daily reading and singing and praying–can be hard work. It takes time and energy and dedication. I have to make a commitment to be there-to show up every day–and do the work.
In the garden, I have to do the hard work, too. I have to turn over the soil. I have to remove rocks, dig deep, rake out the beds. Hauling mulch, planting seeds and watching them grow, recognizing which sprouts are weeds and which are destined to grow into vegetables and flowers. Gardening takes practice.
I’ve been growing plants, vegetables and flowers, for most of my life. By now, I know which seedlings are weeds. I know their names; even know which wild plants are edible. I’ve spent hours and hours working in the soil–getting to know the feel of it, how healthy soil looks and smells, which critters are friends and which are foes.
For me, the hard work is paying off. I can grow vegetables for my family to eat. We have tomatoes, zucchini, and more green beans than we want. One spring, I had so much spinach to harvest, I ate it three meals a day. All of this is the payoff for my years of work.
I love my garden and it shows—the care I lavish on it is obvious in the rampant beautiful growth, the delicious vegetables. But I wonder: can people see the love I have for God when they look at my life? If I truly love the Lord as much as I claim, shouldn’t my life show it in the same way my garden shows my care and love?
The fruit of the land is the result of the hard work of growing my garden. The fruit of the Spirit is the result of the hard work of growing my faith
If I want my life to show my love for God, if I truly want to produce from my heart “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,” then I have to do the work.
If I do the hard work, my garden will produce delicious vegetables and beautiful flowers. Likewise, God promises that if I do the work of study, prayer and worship, my relationship with God will produce beautiful fruit, too.
The View from Mt. Hope 
beautiful and I’m inspired
LikeLike