3 Practical Pointers for Tending the Garden of Your Soul

Our garden on the hill is flourishing this year! Beefy tomato plants have thickened their stems, and, Lord willing, tomatoes will hang there like bright traffic lights by summer’s end. Cucumber and squash vines greedily gobble up space, while pea plants advance vertically, their wispy tendrils grasping the garden fence to help with the climb.

God has given us the abundance of our gardens as a metaphor and a vivid image of his provision.
He has given us the work of the garden to teach us that spiritual growth requires tending and toil.

Likewise, while we know God is holding us in relationship with him, our spiritual formation requires that we ruthlessly patrol what gets in the way of growth. Proverbs 4:23 articulates our game plan:

Keep your heart with all vigilance,
    for from it flow the springs of life.”

Tending my garden helps me to understand some of the ways God has provided for us to diligently “keep” our hearts as believers in Christ:

Kill Sin: A wise gardener will show no mercy to the ravenous beetles and bugs, rodents and slugs who ravage their gardens. She yanks out weeds by the roots and even puts a fence around the garden to foil the local deer population in search of a salad bar. This leads me to ask if my thought life, my entertainment, and my words are forming a “spring of life” in my heart. The Puritan theologian John Owen wrote, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”

Stay Close: “Garden time” is tricky. If we’re going to be away for a few days, we try to clean up the weeds and water everything well before we leave, but we always return to some level of chaos because we weren’t there to tend to routine maintenance. When we take a break from spiritual disciplines, neglecting the sacred text and letting our ongoing conversation with God grow silent, we invite chaos into the garden of our hearts. The means of grace (listening to solid teaching, reading and studying the Bible, prayer, fellowship, etc.) hold us in a gracious watering and weeding for our souls.

Seek Wisdom: Last fall, we sent a soil sample to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, and they advised us on exactly what our garden soil was missing and how to correct the problem. We couldn’t have figured that out on our own without specialized scientific equipment. Likewise, there will be times in your following life when the wisdom of older or more experienced believers will be crucial, either through personal interaction or well-chosen books and sermons.

So, tell me: How does your garden grow?
Do you see the value of the three practices I’ve suggested to bring peace to your distress, counsel for your confusion, perspective to your disorientation, and hope for your future?
What lessons is your garden teaching you in this season?

God has given us the abundance of our gardens as a metaphor and a vivid image of his provision. He has given us the work of the garden to teach us that spiritual growth requires tending and toil.

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Holding You in the Light,

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