Tend the Garden

Every time I walk into Trader Joe’s, I immediately veer to the left.

I approach the rows of fresh flowers with hearts in my eyes (even when I’ve already committed to not buying any of them.) Every now and then, I go in with the singular purpose of finding the right blooms for the one vase I own. There must be an explanation for how much brighter and happier my house feels when there’s something fresh in a vase on my table, right?

No matter what flowers I choose, my process is always the same once I get home. I unwrap all the bunches and separate the “flower food” packets. After I’ve surveyed the options, I start by snipping the bottoms of the stems at an angle. My goal is always a tasteful arrangement; sometimes with varying heights or an assymetrical flow of greens over one side of the vase. Even my type A brain likes to have fun every now and then. Regardless, the one step I can never skip is pruning.

In order for all the flowers I’ve chosen to fit into the vase nicely, I have to remove leaves, unbloomed bits or smaller, broken stems. I’m so aware that I am far from a florist, but I’ve always been satisfied with my final arrangements when I’ve taken the time to remove all the excess.

Images of preparing many arrangements over the years flashed through my mind as I walked the beach last Summer and listened to the song “Tend” for the first time.

The chorus is such a simple and heartfelt offering to God: Be the gardner of my heart, tend the soil of my soul. Break up the fallow ground, cut back the overgrown. And I won’t shy away, I will let the branches fall. So what you want can stay and what you love can grow.

I left footprints in the sand that summer the same way God left an imprint on my heart with the lyrics of the song. They remained sweet until I sensed the Lord had begun a profound pruning in me.

It was lovely to let the words echo in my head, considering the beauty that comes out of us when we’re surrendered to the hands of the Creator of the world.

But the visceral flinch at His most recent first “snip” jolted me out of my la la land. The beauty was still promised but, yikes, the process hurt more than I wanted. He’s continued to reveal, address, and cast out what had grown hard and directly in contradiction to the Holy Spirit dwelling within me.

As the process goes on, I wish I could report that the flinching has ceased and I’ve relaxed my forehead, fully surrendered. But I still flinch. Sometimes there are tears and a furrowed brow. Occasionally my instinct is to beg Him to stop and just leave me alone.

And yet, there are ebenezers that keep me going.

There are markers of past encounters with God where hard work has been done and beautiful things have emerged from the ashes. There are promises from God that this work won’t be in vain.

All I have to do is take a moment to look back and remember how every hard thing I’ve walked through with Him has shaped me a little bit more into His image. Then I’m grateful, hopeful, and eager to press into what He’s doing now. And if I can create flower arrangements that brighten my whole house with my own feeble hands - what in the world can the God of the universe create with a surrendered and willing vessel?