the Requiest

It doesn’t get much better than this - “I want a real chaplain who has a real god and a real hell.“

Many thanks to the linking goodness of Ray Ortlund vis a vis Justin Taylor.

I’ve always wanted a garden. From as far back as I can remember I’ve wanted one. I envisioned what I would have and how beautiful it would be. I dreamed of how I would take care and nurture it. How I would lovingly care for it and everything that it produced. Now I didn’t come to this idea lightly. I knew that there would be problems at times and there would be lots of hard work. I knew there would be days when the sun would feel to hot to work and the bugs would annoy me to distraction, but the picture in my mind would just as quickly brush these thoughts aside. I knew that with a garden I would have a place where I could simply be me not the lie I felt the world demanded me to be. I would find contentment in a garden, in my garden.

Well I have a garden. I’ve had one for almost 20 years now. I worked very hard at getting it, but at the time the work was all pure joy. No matter how much of myself I put into it I felt that I was getting double the return. For a time I did find contentment in it. There was nothing better at the end of a long day than to spend time tending it all of it’s various needs. My wife was/is equally devoted to (now) our garden. It took a little bit of doing on my part to convince her to work with me, but she did. With slight variations in breadth of vision, she caught on to the same dream and diligently worked beside me. At times we would even talk about how we could expand our garden. We knew it was a grandiose idea, yet it had appeal.

However, as time passed I became complacent about tending to the gardens needs. Weeds would sprout up and I would more often than not, try to ignore them. There would be long dry spells and the garden would need watering, but that would have entailed me going out in the heat and so I’d just turn away hoping that a summer rain would nourish it. My wife would come home from an even rougher day and she’d still go out into the garden to tend it, but there was no longer any joy. The garden had just become another job to deal with. Because she’s not the procrastinator that I am, she’d make sure the garden doesn’t die, but at the same time she felt very alone in taking care of it. Because of her diligence and my lack I grew angry with myself, but all too often would turn that anger on her. Now don’t get me wrong, there were times I’d still get into working on the garden with the same glee that I had years ago. On a cool summer morning, even before I’d had breakfast, I could find the joy that I had been missing and even conjure up those more youthful visions of what the garden could become. But those days were few and far between. More often than not, I’d work on the garden so as not to get in trouble with my wife. The garden was not the place of quiet solitude and happiness that it once was.

I used past tense verbs in the previous paragraph on purpose. In the past 2 months I have realized, through more than a little help, that my lack of attention to the garden is causing irreparable harm. I had thought, or at least hoped, that the little bit of attention that I was giving it was enough to sustain it. Of course I was also overly relying on my wife to hold it all together. The reality is that the garden may look good when we clean out the weeds but the soil lacks the nutrients needed to continue using it. So instead of doing the maintenance work all along that was needed, I find myself having to regroup my efforts and begin from scratch giving the garden a fresh start. It’s going to mean a lot of time and energy on my part to clean out all the dead plants and re till the soil, but the investment that I’ve already made, and that my wife has made, is too great to let it continue to fall apart. We both still have our vision of an abundant garden flowing with the fruits (or vegetables) of our labor.

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I ran across this quote from Charles Stanley this morning. I have to admit, it hit me up side the head like a coal shovel.

Do you become critical of people in your past the minute their names are mentioned?

OUCH!!

Please excuse me while I pick my self righteousness up off the ground.