Feeling the need for a concentrated time of prayer one morning, I stepped onto the patio with Bible in hand and cozied myself into one of the lawn chairs. I felt unsettled. Things were not going as I thought they should, and I felt my heart tugging in several directions. The needs in my life seemed numerous and I longed for direction, but my prayers seemed to hang suspended without answers. How was my world fitting together?
As I reflected on my circumstances, I gazed about the wilderness of my yard. It was wild and messy and reminded me of a scene from The Shack, a book I’d been reading in which the protagonist Mackenzie encounters God and works through some of the ironies of his faith. In this particular scene, when Mackenzie walks into a garden with a character named Sarayu, who represents the Holy Spirit, Sarayu tells him about the significance of the garden’s messiness. “This garden is your soul,” Sarayu says to Mackenzie. “This mess is you!”
The messy garden was his soul?
Wow!
I related. I felt that I was a mess right then—scrambled and unsure of myself. Maybe this garden –my own yard—was a picture of my soul, pretty in spots, but unkempt and messy in others. Certain bushes flowered; others waited for another season to bloom. Fern and philodendron meandered about, overgrown and out of control. Everywhere weeds, desperately needing extraction, wound through beds, spoiling what would otherwise be attractive
The words of Sarayu continued swirling through my head as he further unveiled to Mackenzie why they had spent the morning together digging in the garden, which was desperately confusing and messy and “a chaos of color,” but beautiful at the same time.
“Together you and I, we have been working with a purpose in your heart. And it is wild and beautiful and perfectly in process. To you it seems like a mess, but I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive.”
The memory of Sarayu’s words hit me with meaning. Was this similar to how I was? My messy garden and my messy life, both in process? Both wild and beautiful at the same time? Could the messiness in my life actually be part of the beauty?
A Message Through the Ages
As I read my Bible that day and contemplated the truth I saw in my garden as it related to the scene from The Shack, I realized that this had been one of God’s messages throughout the ages. When we allow God to work in our lives, He uses our strengths and weaknesses, pain and joy, failures and successes for His good purpose. We are infinitely complex, and the Holy Spirit joyfully cultivates the beauty and messiness of our lives, scrambling it all together to form a perfect design that pulsates with new life as it emerges from the confusion of its surroundings. Even the Bible surprises us with countless stories of people who followed God but had imperfect lives.
Take a look at Peter, Jesus’ disciple. He must have bitterly bemoaned his messy and capricious heart as he wept bitter tears after denying Jesus not once but three times and at the very moment his Lord was being condemned to death by the Pharisees. How his heart must have withered when Jesus looked at him after that third denial. The conviction that must have burned within his heart! The self-doubt! The self-condemnation! Peter had walked beside Jesus for three years, loved him, vowed never to leave him, but in Jesus’ greatest hour of need, he denied that he even knew him.
But Peter—like us—was in process. He’d come from being a rough-speaking fisherman to a follower of Jesus who one moment was adamant in his unfailing love and the next embarrassed and afraid to be discovered as one of his followers. After Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus plied Peter with questions to test his heart, then challenged him to take the keys of God’s kingdom to a lost world. Peter led the charge. He became a leader among the apostles, suffering many times for his steadfast loyalty and courageous preaching about Jesus as the way to salvation. God took his messy heart and turned him into the rock, the foundation for a growing church of believers.
Like Peter, I’m in process. You’re in process. God looks deep within us and sees the good as well as the messy and troublesome parts that with a little prodding can bloom into something beautiful—something He saw there at the beginning of time when He first thought to create us. He has a future and a plan for us that will grow into reality when we allow Him to be the Gardener of our hearts.
“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. . . . It is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.” Phil: 1:6 & 2:13
© Linda Rooks 2019
Beautiful!
Thank you, Josette.