“Garden of My Heart”
By Kathi B. Moreland, MSW
Licensed Clinical Social Worker

I love gardening! But it is zero degrees outside right now. A foot of snow continues to lie on the ground. And I just returned from a lecture on summer bulbs. It was great! Did I say that I love gardening?

I think that God is like a garden or a sweet fragrant flower in many ways. But, there are times when God is like the seed in the ground in winter. He seems dormant in our lives—maybe like He isn’t there at all. All we see or experience is the coldness of living in disappointment and frustration and the hardness that comes from living in a fallen world! Even when our minds tell us that He is there, we don’t always experience or see His working in our lives. It does not feel that way. But He is working! He is there!

Faith is like the hope of spring. We know, for certain, the new season will come, even when it does not feel to us at the moment that it is coming. We are told to live “by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Matthew 4:4). His truth gets us through the rough winters of our lives and our hope in His promises acts as the hope of spring in our lives. So, we can live according to this truth instead of going by our feelings, which change from moment to moment and according to circumstance and our past experiences of hurt and pain. This is how we are to combat the whisperings that we are not good enough, that we are “damaged goods,” that we could never be pleasing to God.

Jesus taught (Luke 8) that the seed is what He planted in our hearts—His truth: that He loves us, that He is the Christ, and that we can trust Him to grow that seed if He is the one who planted it in our hearts. And He uses the rain and the sun of life to grow us—the difficulties and hurts as well as the blessings.

And although God is like that incredibly beautiful flower, that abundant garden of love and passion and compassion, He is growing us into one as well; a gorgeous, magnificent creation that is fragrant and lovely and that blossoms for his pleasure and for the blessing to those whose lives we come in contact with every day.

Do you see yourself as that fragrant blossom to Him? That is how your heavenly father sees you! Remind yourself daily of how He truly sees you. The master gardener is working in the garden: the garden of your heart!

Check out a previous article from Kathy here