Garden of Discipline

Life began in a garden. God planted Eden and then his children, Adam and Eve, in it. It must have been an extraordinary place where all kinds of animals could thrive, the ultimate ecosystem. I imagine thick-trunked trees of every variety, heavy-laden with fruit; brilliant bunches of bold and delicate flowers; carpets of moss and clover as well as grasses, not competing, but generously feeding all the grazers.

I enjoy gardening but am by no means a master. My thumb is more the pale lime variety rather than a deep forest green. But I believe that in a sense, we are all assistant gardeners.

Each of us contains an inner space where we cultivate priorities, encourage or discourage proclivities, train habits, and prune passions. Purposefully propping and staking our tender, new growth areas, while enjoying the rest of well-established routines, we ambitiously seek growth. It’s a lot of responsibility. But is it ours alone?

The Original Gardener (the OG OG, if you will) hasn’t stopped planting and tending to bring about fruitfulness. Once He’d turned the care of His brand-spanking Earth over to Adam and his kin, God turned His attention to the inner gardens of mankind. As He walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the cool of each evening, I imagine Him purposefully planting seeds of justice and mercy to guide the civilizations that would follow. He trained tender shoots of compassion and truth-loving. And it all would have been watered with love songs of flourishing abundance.

As every parent knows, there’s only so much you can do to guard and guide your children. There will always come a day when they will step out from under the protection and love of their parents and try life on their own terms. At first, the result may be nothing more serious than a skinned knee, but eventually the consequences will be much more severe. The defiant strain of Adam and Eve’s rebelliousness still runs through us all.

Praise God that His steadfast love endures forever. No matter how hard our prodigal hearts strain to break free from the Gardener’s tender care, the loving call to abide never ends.

Jesus used this analogy in John chapter 15, calling Himself the vine and His Father the vinedresser (Gardener, essentially). He taught His followers that the only way to produce anything good was for them to stay continually connected to Him.

An intriguing aspect of abiding with Jesus and allowing God to have His way in the garden of our lives, is that we are invited to participate in our own growth. The master plan belongs to the Master Gardener, but saints throughout the ages have found ways to assist in the taming of their own wildly chaotic and rebellious characters. The tools of this fruit-full program are sometimes called Spiritual Disciplines.

It is so interesting how even the word “discipline” causes our rebel hearts to rise up in defense. We assume that we are about to suffer and somehow become less of ourselves. As if a rose could be trained into becoming a pomegranate tree. This attitude forgets that the Gardener who planted us knows the best ways to help us become our most true, beautiful and fruitful selves.

May we each spend some time today seeking to truly abide with Jesus; quieting our own greedy ambitions; resting and trusting anew in the Original Gardener; listening to that love song of fruitfulness that He is still singing over us. (Zeph 3:17)

{This is the beginning of a series on Spiritual Disciplines. I am currently reading The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster for the first time. I am sure that God is leading my reflections out of this excellent resource.}