The big tidy

When I weed, I pull an unwanted hunk of green here and there. Sometimes I am a little more industrious and actually concentrate on tidying up a flower bed or a section of the garden. When my husband has a back yard blitz, he is far more brutal.

This weekend, he attacked the grass growing over the concrete path, dug sharp cuts along the grassed edges of the mowing strips and ‘thinned’ the vines on the fence. Now, I would cut them back and leave a short curtain of jasmine and ivy but he sees a trim as annihilation! The fence is bald, but for a few straggles of jasmine and a thin line or two of ivy!

At first I gasped to see such havoc, but then, after years of experiencing shock like this, I knew that his ‘discipline’ was the act of the husbandman of our garden. He has the focus of the male mind and if his garden needs to be brought into line, it will certainly know who is boss! For me, I am fearful of bruising the garden’s little psyche.

In a week or two, the scars of bare dirt will be covered again with soft grass and fresh new fronds of vine will be edging back up the fence. But they will be in control. With my ‘soft’ options, no doubt one day the fence itself would groan with the weight of the vines and simply fall over. The concrete path would disappear beneath the marching grasses.

Sometimes, I think God is way too hard on me. But he is the husbandman of my inner garden. I must trust him. Though he seems to cut me sometimes deeply, he only wants to keep me from falling. He wants to keep me from being blinded by slow creeping edges that will stop me from making plain the path to truth.

I must learn to love and submit to his ROD well as his guiding staff.

Water

How amazing water is. My plants survived the big dry with the help of grey water but they don't thrive with this second hand wash water. A day or two with some decent showers and everything responds with life. My water tanks are overflowing at last.

I just learned something the other day and after living a number of decades it astonished me to think that I had lived all these years believing something that was entirely wrong about something that seemed so sure. I learned that rain drops were not in the shape of a tear. No, indeed! They are flat on the bottom and kind of heaped in a round on top.

I thought of all the pictures I must have drawn as a child of Auckland's ubiquitous rain drops. I thought about watching drops forming into tear shapes from dripping umbrellas and tree leaves. I never realised that once gravity pulled them from their cling, they would flatten out and round out before the final splatter.

I have been cheated really. Everyone assumes rain drops are tear shaped. Yet, if we had thought about it a little more, it does make sense. It just isn’t quite as attractive to imagine. Instead of lovely tears falling softly from heaven, we have jelly puddings, splotting everywhere. Not quite the same.

Truth isn’t always what we think either. Just because we are sure of something, it doesn’t make it true. You can live on the washing machine water that is dished out by the wisdom of man. It has some life. But the water Jesus offered was pure. It doesn’t always fit what I like to see and it isn’t always pretty, but just a few drops of what falls from heaven changes everything. We were made for this water to fill us and anything less just leaves us feeling duped.