Every morning at breakfast, I look out the kitchen window upon a most dismal sight: a desolate raised bed, overgrown with grass, sprouting nothing more than mountainous ant beds. Years ago, when I first moved back to Mississippi, I had big dreams of my own little thriving patch of earth. Big, red, ripe tomatoes would be overflowing. I could just see them! Things didn’t go quite like I’d imagined, and within a year or two, after being thoroughly thwarted by all manner of tomato devouring bugs, I gave up entirely. 

Now, I know a few excellent gardeners – people whose whole hands are green, not just their thumbs. My friend Jimmy invited me to visit his garden in my early days as a newcomer to the church we attend. I could not have imagined what I was in for. Jimmy’s garden qualifies as a Faerie Realm. You can go for a 30 minute stroll there and see a new beauty at every corner.  

If you were to choose who to ask for advice about planting this or that,  you would be a fool to ask me and not Jimmy. I’d be more than happy to assist you in the cultivation of unintended ant colonies, but if you want to grow a beautiful wonderland of flowers and trees, Jimmy is your man. 

We’re always having to choose who to go to for wisdom. In a world so confused, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Jesus says  “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” It takes a sustained, deliberate effort to listen for the voice of our Good Shepherd. And we can’t do it alone. We need all the help we can get holding onto the truth about Jesus, and the truth that we belong to him as his beloved ones. There’s no shortage of thorny voices working to prick and scratch at our most vulnerable trust. 

Who are the “master gardeners” we can turn to? Where do we see evidence of good fruit (not success or acclaim)? The Scriptures first, of course; we start with the history of God’s mighty acts in the world and the apostle’s teaching. And then, throughout history, we have the writings and testimonies of faithful fellow pilgrims that have stood the test of time. We meet together regularly to listen, sing, pray, and feast at the Lord’s Table. And, we go to the actual garden of Creation itself to encounter the innumerable declarations of God’s glory that persist at every moment.

In short, “victory is won through many counselors.” If the path has been “marked out for us” as Hebrews 12:1 says, that means that the trail of faith-keeping has been blazed by a trailblazer who has gone before us, namely Jesus, but also these witnesses: these steady stars who shine out in the universe, marking out this path of ours that only faith has eyes to see, that ends in Joy.

Ultimately, Jesus himself has promised that the Holy Spirit, The Lord the Giver of Life, is available to each of us both individually, and as we meet together. Who can untangle the confused mess we must endure in this world in order to keep faith in Jesus? Whose eyes are clear enough here where we see through a muddy mirror in the meantime? If only we had access to the clear and unconfused Mind of Christ. Well, actually, Paul says that we do: 

For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God… we have the mind of Christ. 

Last night, two different experiences encouraged me. The first was a prayer meeting at our church. There are a few folks in our church family who are especially passionate about both praying for people behind the scenes and creating gatherings where folks can pray together. Last night about forty or fifty of us got together at the church, a woman improvised on a viola quietly in a corner of the room, and the rest of us spread out. Those who wanted to be prayed for wrote a prayer request on a card and set it beside them so anyone else who wanted to pray could walk around, read the request, and pray silently for a moment behind them. Addiction, broken families, divorce, fear, sorrows all showed up on those cards. Folks asking for quiet in their noisy minds, wisdom amidst confusion, assurance of belovedness, folks wanting to learn how to love alongside Jesus, or prayers for strength just to keep from giving up entirely. 

It was good to pray together. 

The other experience was at the weekly small group I’ve been attending for the last four or five years. We started reading Richard Foster’s “Celebration of Discipline.” It’s a book that sat patiently on my shelf for a very long time, and never got read. But last night, we read the introduction together and it felt like sitting with a master gardener. Some anthills got a little stirred up, some weeds got tugged at, but it felt good, you know? 

Foster pointed out that, if we desire any real change in our lives we won’t be able to do it through willpower. We just can’t heal ourselves. You can’t fix a broken thing with that broken thing. If your brain or heart is sick, don’t expect to think or feel your way to wholeness. Only an Unconfused One can untangle confusion. Only a holy one can mend us. Foster goes on to say that the spiritual disciples like prayer, fasting, service, study and so forth are not in themselves magic procedures through which we can accomplish our own transformation. Instead, they are practices that cultivate proximity and receptivity. Proximity to the God who is unconfused and can touch our souls with healing, and receptivity to that graceful touch. They are practices that keep us close and open to the Heart who is the  true life of our hearts. 

My master gardener friend Jimmy would probably say that he is not the one who made the flowers or who makes the flowers grow, but he has learned how to care for them, to keep his plot of ground in touch with the things that make growth possible. Jimmy is not water or sun, air or soil. No amount of willpower will make a flower grow, but care and loving discipline can give a dull corner of earth a chance to be transformed into something gloriously beautiful. 

The prayer leaders at my little church would probably say that they don’t have any magic words to manage or manipulate reality. We gathered to pray, not to will some change into manifesting, as if a flower could strong-arm the sun into shining. No, we gathered to practice getting close to each other and to the God who is like water, sun, air, and soil to our souls. We pray to help each other stay close and open to the work that only God can do, and in his gracious love deeply desires to do. 

There’s so much I’d like to change in this world, and so much I’d like to change in my own heart. I’ve tried working myself into a frenzy of unsustainable determination, only to wear out and find the real root issues untouched. How discouraging. But then I’m reminded by the master gardeners in my life that it’s the small, steady, unimpressive practices that keep me turning and opening my heart to Jesus that make healing possible. 

It’s worth noting that, like everything God asks us to do, this is a life-giving pattern that applies just about anywhere. Research shows that there may be something to the old clichés that say “The family that prays together stays together” after all. Love is not automatic, nor does it respond well to willful demands. Any loving relationship, if it’s to develop and thrive, calls for the same practiced patterns that Foster outlines in “Celebration of Discipline” and that the church is built around. Eating together, praying together, singing, serving together, listening to one another, apologizing and forgiving, studying the truth together, practicing self-restraint, and so on. These things in themselves aren’t magic procedures, but practices whereby we keep our leaves open to sunlight, our roots near to water, like a tree planted by the streams. And as we do these things together, we’ll have help getting the bugs off our tomatoes, keeping the ant beds in check, and the thorny weeds from choking out the good things God dreams of for his children. 

Who knows maybe a little more of the kingdom of God will spring up here on earth? 

Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

South and west it looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; and groves and thickets there were of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; and there were junipers and myrtles; and thymes that grew in bushes, or with their woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; and marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops. Primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes; and asphodel and many lily-flowers nodded their half-opened heads in the grass: deep green grass beside the pools, where falling streams halted in cool hollows on their journey down to Anduin.

The travellers turned their backs on the road and went downhill. As they walked, brushing their way through bush and herb, sweet odours rose about them. Gollum coughed and retched; but the hobbits breathed deep, and suddenly Sam laughed, for heart’s ease not for jest. They followed a stream that went quickly down before them. Presently it brought them to a small clear lake in a shallow dell: it lay in the broken ruins of an ancient stone basin, the carven rim of which was almost wholly covered with mosses and rose-brambles; iris-swords stood in ranks about it, and water-lily leaves floated on its dark gently-rippling surface; but it was deep and fresh, and spilled ever softly out over a stony lip at the far end.

The Return of the King, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”  J.R.R. Tolkien