Gardening Time

Those who know me know I don't garden.  My wife gardens; I unload mulch and complain that the dinner I cooked is getting cold because she won't leave the garden until it gets dark. I got enough of digging in the dirt and pulling weeds growing up on a farm, got it out of my system years ago.

But the first warm days of March always make me think of growing things, of the unique and wonderful smell of newly plowed earth, of putting  seed and fertilizer in the ground annd covering them up with a hoe.  I like gardening in a theoretical sense, in a nostalgic kind of way.

Sometimes I get that way about church too. I remember the part I like about the good old days and wonder why it isn't like that anymore and silently fuss and fume that it isn't.  There are two things I usually fail to remember in those fussing and fuming moments; 1) the good old days weren't so good, and 2) the parts that were good were the result of a lot of hard work on the part of the church and God.

Just as I have decided  to forego the good parts of gardening because I don't want to endure the hard parts, many of us are missing some of the good parts of Church because we have decided to sit it out, have decided to forego the hard parts, and then we wonder why God isn't doing such wonderful things in the church as we remember from the past.

Heard a good joke at a Continuing Education class this week.  Pastor walked two blocks to church every day.  Walked past an old house where everyday he saw a man out working in the garden, one day he walked past when the sun was shining brightly and the flowers were in full bloom and he just stood and stared and sighed and said to the gardener, "My goodness, you and God have a beautiful garden."  The gardener looked around and grunted, "Well, you should have seen it when God had it by hisself!"

Delmer