Gardens, Consistency, Love…

And other random thoughts…

I just picked the first cuke off my cucumber plant.  It is officially the first fruit of my little bed of plants.  I would take a picture, but in a rare turn of events, this blog has been picture heavy lately, so I think I’ll skip it.  It’s just an average size cucumber that is nothing extraordinary, so I’m sure I don’t need to document it. 

I will say that Munchkin was super ecstatic when we picked it though!  “WOW, mom, that growed FAST,” she says.  Well…I guess so, if your definition of fast is 2 months.  HAH.  LOL.  But she didn’t plant it, so I guess in her mind, we have cucumbers as of today.  That’s fast. 

I went up to my garden spot after church tonight.  Life is crazy busy these days and the house/yard is suffering (well, suffering as in: progress is halted, not as in it’s getting worse, laundry pile excluded).  But I haven’t had time to get up there and check the plants in a few days.  Thankfully it’s rained, so I haven’t worried about that so much, but I haven’t checked them either.  Anyways my neighbor went out of town for a couple of days so she wanted me to pick her blueberry bush every day to keep the birds from getting them.  Well, I missed doing that yesterday so that’s why I went up there tonight and I checked my little garden on the way back down the hill.

All I know is it is amazing what a couple of days will do.  I weeded on Thursday and there were weeds up there that were almost as big as the plants (And the plants; OH MY.  The tomatoes DEFINITELY need some more tying up…they’ve totally outgrown the last ties).  I was thinking, surely I didn’t miss a weed that big on Thursday…but how in the world could it have grown that large in three days, so I must HAVE missed it.  I’m sure on Thursday I did see it and it was probably small, so I thought…well, that’s not a big one, I’ll get it later. 

How like life that is.  We weed things out of our life, but we don’t get every last root, even the small ones.  Then we look away for a few days and we turn around and we can’t understand where that LARGE UGLY WEED that is cluttering up our garden came from.  And when you pull that large ugly weed out, it disturbs a large clump of soil that if you had only pulled it when it was small, would never have been disturbed at all. 

And that is a perfect segue into tonight’s message at church.  Consistency Vs The Up and Down coaster.  I won’t even put it on anyone but myself. 

I get all ambitious and pull all the weeds out of my life, then get busy and miss a day or two of Bible reading (or do/not do something else that is equally important, like letting a thought slip through and rest in your mind for awhile, or having a bad attitude…whatever the case may be) and next thing you know, you turn around and think.  OH MY.  I thought I pulled these weeds.  Where did that come from? 

And like Bro K preached tonight (although he didn’t liken it to weeds and I may have totally missed the point – things get a little scattered when you have two little ones distracting you in church – it’s just what I got out of it) instead of being consistent, you’re on one day and off the next.  And that affects people’s view of your garden.  One day they see your garden and the weeds are competing with your fruit and the next, you’re getting rid of all the weeds, and the next, HEY…all the weeds are back…….hum.  Can people see my fruit through the weeds?  Or are they confused as to what my garden is supposed to be growing because one day they see fruit and the next week it’s weeds?  It’s a challenging thought. 

Also on challenging thoughts, Bro R preached on the Love of God this morning and while it’s hard to sum it up in a few sentences, I’ll just put it this way.  I was challenged. 

Taking the love God has for us is one thing (you know, the part where He loved us so much that He sacrificed His BEST to save us)…but turning around and showing that kind of Love to others is another thing entirely.  Because I like to think I LOVE everybody, but I sometimes don’t LIKE some of them very much.  Just being honest.  But the scripture that Bro R. used this morning was in 1 John I think, about he who loveth not, KNOWETH NOT GOD.  I am the type of person who tries to get along with everybody, even those who don’t like me, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who drive me nuts. 

I’ll just confess my faults and say that there are times when I DO the right thing and do my best to show the Love of God, but then gripe privately about it.  I’m  sure that probably negates the whole Love thing, but at least the LOVE chapter in the Bible doesn’t say anything about “charity never complains” it just says that love has to endure, hope, believe, suffer long, and not be easily provoked (among other things).  I’m sure it’s a good thing for me that it doesn’t say love CAN’T be provoked, it just isn’t EASILY provoked.  HAHA. 

Seriously though…one other thing in this morning’s message that struck me was what he said about how it’s not having the Love of God when you refuse to speak to someone over whatever the matter or whosever fault.  It’s not even if you bite your tongue and be polite when you run into them.  The Love of God reaches past all that and says, “how can I sacrifice myself?”  I know people who say they have the Love of God and…well…I can’t see the heart, but I never saw any evidence that they had what they claimed.  But one thing I do know for sure, I don’t want to find myself in that category of people.  Help me, Lord.

Just some thoughts I’ve been pondering today. 

PS Thank you, Lord, that the headsplitting throbbing has finally subsided and I can think straight again.  Not that anyone would ever think THIS was thinking straight…since my most straightest (ha) thinking is still absolutely scattered and random, but thanks, Lord, that I can now THINK that I’m thinking straight.  =)