The
Garden of Your Heart
By Brita Crouse
“Hear, O
Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (NIV)
I read a book where the author
compared the human heart to a garden. To the main character, the garden looked
messy and chaotic. But when God was allowed to prune the garden and replaced
certain flowers with new ones, the garden was more beautiful than ever before.
I love to be organized; messes
stress me out. That’s why it is so hard for me to desire (or at times, even
admit to) a messy, chaotic heart. Instead of allowing Jesus into all aspects of
my life, I compartmentalize and only allow Him into certain parts of who I am.
But God hates this. In fact, He says
so in Revelation 3:16: “So, because you are lukewarm
- - neither hot nor cold - - I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” He
doesn’t want us to be wishy-washy about our faith. He wants ALL of us. Every
part. As commanded in the verse above, we are to love God with ALL of our heart
and ALL of our soul and ALL of our strength.
You wouldn’t say to your best friend
or husband, “I will be open and honest with you when we are together, but any time
we are apart, you can’t know what I’m doing.” That sounds absurd!
The thing is: God knows everything
about us. He knows more about us than we know about ourselves. Yet, He doesn’t
force us to surrender ourselves to Him. He wants us to make that conscious
effort and choice. He wants us to want
to give our heart to Him.
In this book I read, God says to the
main character about the garden, “This mess is you!... To you it seems like a
mess, but to Me, I see a perfect pattern emerging and growing and alive...” [1]
We cannot surrender every part of
our heart to God without His help. But this is not a burden to Him. He enjoys
helping us through the process of pruning our hearts. And in doing this, not
only are our hearts more beautiful than ever before, we will draw closer in
relationship to our Gardener.
God doesn’t ask us to have our
hearts organized into neat, little compartments. Instead, He asks us to give
Him our heart, our whole heart, no matter the condition.
GOING DEEPER:
1.
What are parts of your heart that you are not giving over to God?
2.
Ask God this week de-compartmentalize and prune your heart.
FURTHER READING:
[1] William P. Young, The
Shack. Pg. 138, Windblown Media, © 2007
Brita is a licensed K-12 School Counselor and works as the
Non-Public Counselor in Roseville, Minnesota. For the past eighteen years, she
has called Oakwood her home church.
