I'm afraid to say that I'm starting something new. Announcements like that create expectation not only in myself, but in anyone you tell about it. I learned about myself long ago that fear of unfulfilled expectation is almost guaranteed to sabotage any hope of change or achievement of goals. So instead, I have learned to keep things to myself, between myself and the Lord, as an unspoken prayer between myself and my Creator. He knows my tendency to lose interest and instead pursue a task with a measurable, visible outcome. To put aside the work with invisible progress to create something pretty or something that benefits someone else.
So I'm going to try my best to avoid an announcement. I don't know what this will become.
For many years now I have spent countless hours in the garden. I could almost type that word with a capital G, considering what a Holy place of Communion it has become to me. There has been no other place in my life where I have been met so clearly with the presence of God. He has met me here with comfort, fresh understanding of His nature, and even answers to questions I was ashamed to bring Him in prayer.
Over the years, I have shared short stories of things I have learned walking with the Lord in the garden. As a result, I have learned that I'm not the only one who has had this experience. I have even heard a staunch Atheist, a caregiver of a famous garden in Canada, who said she does not believe in any higher power, but when she spends time in the garden...she can't explain the wonder and order and peace she has found there.
Friends have asked me to put together a book, or a devotional of lessons I've learned with my hands in the soil. I don't know if that will come of this. Or if anything. But as I was pulling weeds this morning, weeds that had grown up seemingly overnight, threatening to choke my dreams of a pumpkin patch along our front wall, I couldn't even contain the lessons, already learned and coming freshly to mind, that I was remembering with every pull.
So I left the task half finished (shock and surprise!) and brought my abandoned blog out to the garden to write some of them down.
This is not an announcement as much as it is a prayer. I would like to share some things that God has shown me, and I am asking Him to organize my jumbled, dusty thoughts into something that might produce fruit. My heart has been cultivated, and the seed has been planted.
