A cottage garden invites one in to enjoy its beauty and sensual delights. Sights, tastes, smells, and tactile pleasures abound. Butterflies flutter and glide; humming birds whir and hover; bees buzz, toads hop, and deer and rabbits feast. Scenes of beginnings, maturings, endings and peaceful, contemplative spaces connect us with the human story of seasons of dormancy, renewal, growth, flowering, and fruitfulness.
God chose a garden as the place to give mankind life and the authority, wisdom, and ability to enjoy divine goodness, love, joy and relationships. Eden was a beautiful place filled with purpose, a place meant to be cherished. Lush plants and diverse creatures beneficially and peacefully coexisted and replicated themselves in all their magnificence. The seeds of one generation would produce the next, and there, humanity was to reflect God’s nature, to be fruitful, and to multiply.
Right away, mankind came up against the divine principle that actions have consequences. Sin fractured Eden’s tranquility when Adam failed to trust in and questioned and disobeyed God’s holy integrity. The price of that transgression was great and pervasive. All creation’s material and spiritual soil became disordered, corrupted, messy, and distorted. Weeds, backbreaking labor, painful childbirth, aggressive and selfish behaviors, suffering, and inescapable death ensued. Ignoring and transgressing moral imperatives are harmful acts of unbelief, they affront God’s sovereignty and holiness, destroy one’s relationship with Him, bring spiritual confusion and discontentment, and are worthy of death. Unholiness cannot exist in the presence of holiness.
However, despite moral weaknesses and natural imperfections, disobedient, rebellious humanity and this errant creation were not annihilated, but God in unimaginable love and grace took all humanity’s sins and placed them on Jesus. In his perfection, he paid the price. He atoned for us by dying in our place on the cross so that by faith we could know forgiveness and reconciliation with God, who continues to faithfully care for and move all His creation toward restoration.
Fortunately, restoration to God is not achieved by rule keeping and good behavior because we fail at both. By works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16). But a soul’s redemptive transformation requires a free will choice facilitated by faith.That is a divine principle. Those “who seek (God) with their whole heart” willingly submit to divine wisdom and authority (Ps 119:2). Belief and confession ( sorrow filled recognition and admission of wrongful attitudes and actions) combined with a change of heart (a turning away from or repentance) lead to a righteous state. (1John 1:12).
God in his grace has always had our best interest in mind and has given us guidance in how to live a blessed life. The Psalmist knew that God’s principles for living, not our selfish desires, are the best possible and only good ways to live because they proceed from His omniscient, loving heart. God’s directives found in Holy Scripture are not vindictive judgments and condemnations but are meant to help us experience what is good. The Psalmist wrote: Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the LORD!” (Ps119:1)
In a parable about a vine and its branches, Christ told his followers if they would abide in him as the vine (continue and define their lives in trusting faith), he would be the source of their peace, joy, love, righteousness, and eternal life (John 15). Empowered by his Spirit, believers are more than caretakers of this material world. In the words of William Jay, those of faith become “the dew of heaven, the salt of the earth, and the light of the world.” And one might add, “ the love of Christ.”
Faithful believers are meant to be earth’s spiritual caretakers. They are God’s designated nurturers of humanity, sowing the seeds of Christ’s love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, self control, and faithfulness (Galatians 5:22-23) to families, friends, communities, and all peoples—the blessed sharing the blessing, caringly spreading the seeds of God’s redemptive Good News and the hope of eternal life. God does the rest. He restores receptive soil into a growing, blooming eternal Kingdom of beautiful souls.
Sweet Words from Maine 