Life is a Garden
This note is the culmination of something God has been teaching me over the last couple months. I have learned life is a garden, not a machine. What I mean by this is life is organic, not systematic. Life isn’t something I can control, but it is something I can tend to. A system can be defined as rigidly designing how circumstances/inputs influence an outcome/outputs. The better a system, the more robust it is against external stimuli trying to disrupt it. It is rather tempting to approach our lives from a systems perspective. We look at our circumstances, see what outcome we want, and do our best to protect our way of life from any interruptions. This however has a major flaw to it, us. We are quite flawed designers who have no hope of creating a robust system, and on top of that the outcome we often desire fails us too!
Thank God this is not what scripture prescribes for us. Scripture presents us with a very different way of thinking. Rather than trying to protect our lives from any external influence, we are called to completely surrender to Christ’s influence. I have come to see the task of gardening over the last few months to be quite a manly calling, although man’s counterpart I believe has quite a better eye for it. Adam before the fall, the very definition of man, was called to be a gardener:
15. Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how a husband and father out to see himself as his family’s gardener. His job is to tend to and nurture his wife and children, pull out any weeds that could choke out the family’s wellbeing, shoo away any pest or crow that seeks to harm his family. His goal is to provide his family everything they need to grow emotionally, physically, and spiritually. If he treats his home as a machine, he will find he’s not quite the mechanic he imagined himself to be. Cracking the whip and harsh rules may drive a machine forward, but a family will break. This must be why scripture doesn’t describe a man’s family as his work, but as his fruit:
3. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine In the very heart of your house, Your children like olive plants All around your table.
Not only is a man’s family his garden, but his walk with the Lord is as well. Chapter 6, A Garden not a Factory, of Chuck Smith’s book Why Grace Changes Everything describes this well, “When it’s natural it’s in the realm of fruit; when it’s pressured it’s in the realm of works.” (pg. 94) In that chapter, Smith explains how our walk with the Lord is not a factory producing “works” by the flesh, but a garden producing “fruit” by our faith. This is well supported by Paul’s epistle to the Galatians:
2. This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
3. Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?
God also describes us as His garden! We are called His fruit, and He describes himself as our keeper. This concept is explored in Greg Stone’s devotion The Secret Place of the Most High. As God’s garden, we haven’t been placed out in the wilderness to be left desolate. God has called us in to His fortress, to be under His wing. Stone writes, “…follow David to the secret place where you can fellowship with the Lord. For there you will find assurance in all things, knowing that He will never leave you nor forsake you. His love will carry you through the fiercest of storms.”
5. “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.