Meditation Metaphor: Garden Your Heart

I am not a gardener.

I enjoy eating vegetables that come from a garden, but I've never been interested in putting in the time and work to produce a really good garden.

My wife does enjoy gardening, but only to a certain extent. Once the weather gets really hot and the weeds get aggressive, her passion for gardening withers.

Since my indifference to gardening pretty much leaves her on her own, she applies her green thumb to growing flowers and herbs.  The photo above is of one of her garden spots in our yard.  I enjoy the flowers and I certainly enjoy the flavor the herbs add to our meals.  But I don't contribute much to her garden other than making sure to avoid mowing over it and occasionally pulling a few weeds.

If you expand the picture above you'll see some unusual things, especially near the drainpipe.  Those are part of the faerie garden maintained by the young girls who live next door. They help Karen with the flower gardening and use their imagination to build faerie castles and other fanciful things among the plants.

And then there's the garden in the photo below.  Our neighbor, David, spends a lot of time working on this garden.

He has nurtured the soil of that garden over the past half dozen years, so that it's rich with all the nutrients needed for a bountiful crop. It's a raised earth garden, which means the soil is built up to a higher level than the lawn around it. As you can tell, he has also built a number of trellises and other contraptions to support the growing plants.

I don't spend much time working on that garden either. My wife helps him out from time to time.

I do, however, enjoy the vegetables David shares with us. Very much so. And I don't really feel as guilty about it as I probably ought.

Many Christians tend to their hearts like I tend to a garden.

They enjoy hearing a good sermon or even reading a good religious book.  they're glad to share in a discussion about spiritual matters.  But their interest in spending quality time meditating on the scriptures is fairly shallow.

They enjoy being fed.  they just don't want to spend much time working for it.

Others use their Bible reading time to look for lovely and encouraging verses, or simply for pleasure and diversion from the real world.

Effective meditation on the Word requires nurturing your heart to be a receptive soil for God's teachings.  It requires spending enough time deep in the Bible that you're able to get past the weeds of preconceived notions and prejudice.

If David were to move away, my daily diet would be much poorer. For many folks, if their favorite preacher were to move away, they'd have no clue how to maintain the level of Bible nourishment they've grown used to.

Go ahead.  Pick up a shovel or a spade.  Get some dirt under your fingernails. Dig in to the Word.