This season has been about working through perceptions from the past. I have to laugh at myself so often, for #TheTackyBrownHouse has more lessons in her than most schools. Do you know if you spend your days on another period of your life you may just miss the one you’re living? Yesterday was that sort of day. Les and I had come in from a full weekend of travel, grand adventures, and life as two folks who work separately but together. I set out to find towels in the house to get them laundered and dishes washed, lamenting that another weekend gone without a garden planted. Now understand calling me a gardener would be a stretch by any measure of the word as far as plants are concerned. My successs in growing things has more to do with cultivating minds and careers than stems and plants. I try, oh how I try, but while I do fairly well with flowers and bushes, my vegetable gardens are shall we say, lacking vegetable harvests most years. Weeds I am excellent at cultivating but the fruits of my labor for food have been lack luster.
About the time I had rounded up the towels, (how does that man manage to get them in every corner of the house during this renovation) Les headed inside and said “your tomato plants are looking fine” What? Huh? What tomato plants. He took me by the hand to our back door where neatly in a row were four maturing tomato plans. They apparently came from a previous harvest or perhaps a tomato thrown to the yard. I know there’s a sermon somewhere in the story of how a silly strategist spends her weekend struggling to harvest herself while God manages to seed, grow, and bloom her provision without her assistance. Let that sink in a moment in your own life. Where are you working and working because you believe it is within you to do while God is patiently waiting for you to let Him bring you the harvest? There’s your pondering for the week…
We began painting the back entry to the little brown house. I am not much for beiges, but I found a linen color that would bring enough light to the one window room and yet bring a hint of backdrop color for the white dove trim to pop. This little room is an awkward small room but it is one I will love when it’s done. For now we’re still in the “just until” mode of furniture placement as some of it will come from my father’s home in Arkansas and other pieces will go to our grown children, it’s fruit basket furniture turnover in my life. For that matter its fruit basket turnover period in my life period.
I keep thinking back to the realization that the garden I so wished to exist ultimately had no need of my hands. God simply provided. Why is it I too often believe that the struggle is the ticket to the blessing? I have yet to find anywhere in the Bible that speaks of the qualifier of struggle to receive the blessing. You? As this “Year of Allowing” continues, I find God is gently pointing more and more areas of my life that I can allow to be His in my life….struggles that do not have to be mine or exist at all. Isn’t that the hardest thing to give up at the root of it? The belief that we have to do something because….
What are you struggling to plant in your life that just might exist if you’d only allow it?
