In The Garden

It amazes me that even as our world seems to be filled with so much inconsequential nonsense and hype, the power of God's creation still speaks volumes to a hurried, worried, fractured world. I recently took this picture while strolling through the Chicago Botanic Gardens (a taste of heaven on earth for me).  I had come off a busy week and was taking some friends to see the fall colors and everywhere we walked was a picture that spoke louder than any sermon about God and His love, mercy, grace and comfort to us world weary travelers.

I love how just walking through a field or grove of trees or beautiful garden, immediately recalibrates my mind to focus on the truly important things of life and to feel gratitude and peace well up in my soul. God says in Romans that His creation speaks loudly of His existence.  I concur. I often walk these garden paths and imagine myself in the Garden of Eden where God walked with Adam and Eve in the "cool of the day", communing with them.  I have often walked through the Botanic Gardens and seen birds, chipmunks, butterflies, geese, swans, deer, and even wooly caterpillars, and every imaginable plant and flower,  and felt my spirit stirred by the magnificence of almighty God.  And always I remember a song my grandmother used to sing, I have a copy of it on my prayer room wall, "In the Garden".  I've always loved this song and it has become a theme of  sorts in my life the last l5 years or so.  I feel like God has worked in me a bountiful  harvest of peace and joy and that I am happy to "bloom where I have been planted" for this season of my life.

The words to this song will always speak to me of God's walking through life with me.  He walked through life with my Grandma Brady and as she walked with Him she prayed for us, all her grandkids and great-grandkids, just as she had for her own eight kids! She was a gardener, a tiller of soil, a harvester. I was always amazed at the bounty that could come from her vegetable garden and nourish us so much when we sat around her table, just as her prayers nourished us.  I think she learned a lot about God's nature and faithfulness by working in her garden planting seeds, pulling weeds and waiting for harvest while depending on the Good Lord for sun and rain. She, too,was one who walked with God in the garden in the cool of the evening ~  thinking and praying over the needs of her large family whom she loved so much and thanking Him for caring for us all.

I can hear her singing in her little kitchen as she's rolling biscuit dough with her apron on and her hands dusty with flour:

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses
and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me and he talks with me and He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.  

Now I hear her singing as she stands beside me in the little white church by her house across the creek.  We would visit her in West Virginia from our nomadic lifestyle as a military family.

He speaks and the sound of His voice, is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
and the melody that He gave to me, within my heart is ringing
And he walks with me, and he talks with me and He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

The Garden, a theme that has run through my life and brought me joy. The irony is I don't have a green thumb at all like my grandmother or even my mother who could grow anything! But I have been able to grow in my faith that God planted in me at l6.  I found out a few years ago that my name, Teresa, means harvester!  Just as my grandmother and many wonderful mentors have planted seeds in my life, I love to plant the seeds of God's word and watch them grow. I have planted seeds in the lives of students as a teacher, I have planted seeds in the lives of friends and other women that God has called me to as a mentor, and I have planted seeds in the lives of my own children in our home. I have not been a perfect gardener by any means, but I have walked with the Master Gardener and asked him to send water and sunshine on those seeds that there might be an abundant harvest to His glory. I sometimes think of my reunion in heaven with my grandma....I want to sing "In the Garden" with her
as we walk with God "in the cool of the evening".

Galatians 6:8b-9 He that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap everylasting life. Be not weary in well doing, for in due season we will reap a harvest if we faint not.