As I walked with the bags of plants, I thanked God for them
because I knew they were a gift from Him. I always ask Him which way to walk,
and He led me down a street I don’t usually walk on and there the plants were.
I love plants, and this year the annual herbs I had planted fresh from seed like basil did not
come up, and some of the perennial ones that thrived last year didn’t come back. Some
did, but the summer has been so hot and dry that some of them didn’t survive. I
was able to bring home basil and tarragon and mint. I love all herbs, but those
are three that I love to have and try to grow all the time.
I had just been at a meeting with one of the sites where I
teach my nutrition and wellness classes, and it’s also a site where I have been
incorporating their rooftop garden into the classes I teach. Earlier in the day
I’d been at another meeting with an organization that helped fund the first
year of that garden and I had recently been introduced to another site they
funded for this current year. Gardening and nutrition and wellness go hand in
hand in my opinion. I love gardening and to incorporate it into nutrition and wellness
workshops is something that works beautifully. I started doing the work that I
do in nutrition and wellness because of a community garden the Lord had me
start at the after school program I used to work with, and they just naturally
flow together for me. Finding the herbs on my way home was a little thank you
gift from my Father in heaven, encouragement to me that I am walking in the way
He wants me to walk.
Being a Christian is not easy. I had been talking to a man I
know who has been going through some tough times. When I met him, he was at the
point in his life when he was returning to the Lord, or maybe even turning to
Him for the first time. The first time I met him he was in a very bad mood, and
after talking to him for a while, he started to smile. I hadn’t seen him in a
few months, and when I last saw him things were getting much better. When I
started talking to him this time around, he’d had some disappointments and setbacks
and he said he didn’t want to talk about God right now because he was so mad at
Him. I understand where he’s coming from, and I told him that it’s ok to be
angry with God, just as long as we talk to Him about it. But he said he was so
angry that he didn’t want to talk to Him at all. I talked to him about what was
going on, and he’d lost a job that he’d thought was a good one because someone had lied about him to save their own job, and he'd lost the
opportunity to date a woman because when he lost the job she wasn’t interested
any more. I found out that the job had been a dangerous one, working in
security, and that he could have been seriously hurt at some point or worse.
The woman of course from my perspective was better off lost because if all she
was interested in was his money, who needs her anyway? But of course from where
he was sitting, that wasn’t going to fly. I did my best to encourage him that
when God allows things to happen to us, there is always a good reason even when
we don’t see it ourselves, and I did see a smile start to come on his face
again after a while of talking. When I said I saw a smile he said, “That’s
for you and not for Him," and I told him it was the same thing. The words I had spoken, and even the fact that I had run into him just at this right time, were all things that were coming from the heart of God so that he could be encouraged and keep walking.
It is so hard sometimes to walk with God that I sometimes
wonder myself why it has to be so hard. Sometimes when I am going through it I forget all the things that I was
telling this man, things that I know are true, like trials only come when we
are truly walking with Him, or that He always turns things around for our best
good, or that when something is taken away from us He always returns it to us
in double and triple amounts of what we had lost. But then someone is going
through something and I start to talk them through it, and I hear the words
that I need to hear myself coming out of my own mouth to encourage them.
When I got home last night I thanked the Lord for a good
day. I said, “This was a good day, thank You.” And He replied something that I
know but that I had forgotten, “Every day can be a good day, it’s really just
up to you.” When we know who God is and when we trust Him to do what He
promises to do, there is nothing that can ruin our day ever. We have it in our
power to speak His word over our lives no matter what comes at us and to have
His peace in the middle of every storm. Over and over the Lord tells us not to
fear. It’s all over the Old and the New Testament. Jesus tells us, “Fear not, I
have overcome the world,” (John 16:33), He asks His disciples when they panic during
a storm on the water, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” (Matthew
14:31), and He tells them when He comes to them walking on the water and they
are terrified, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” (Matthew 14:27) In
Isaiah 41:10, the Lord tells us, “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be
afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; I will help you; I will hold
you with my righteous right hand.” And there are so many more times that we are encouraged to have no fear, to have courage because He Himself is walking with us. But somehow, when the storms come, when
things happen that don’t seem at all like they are right or fair or that
anything good could come of them, no matter what we know that God promises to
us, it is very easy to stop trusting in His word.
It’s at times like that when we must draw closer to Him
rather than pulling away. It is only through bringing our doubts and fears and
worries, and yes, our anger too – our anger and bitterness and hurt and weakness
and disappointment – it is only through bringing all of our emotions of loss
and grief and pain to Him that He can start to take us through it to the other
side. If we turn away, the bitterness and anger and all the other negative
emotions start to eat away at us inside, and the place they start to eat into
first is our heart. Courage comes from a heart that is strong and whole and
healed. A heart that has holes in it from anger and sorrow and bitterness
cannot have the courage to love and to trust and to have faith. If we continue
to live our lives with those holes in our heart, they will continue to grow
larger without our even knowing it until there is an empty place where our
heart is supposed to be.
In the Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man wanted a heart, and at the
end of the movie, after he has gotten his heart from the Wizard, and he has to
say goodbye to Dorothy, he says, “Sometimes you don’t know that you have a
heart until it’s broken.” When we don’t bring our broken hearts to God, we can
end up with no heart at all.
It’s not easy walking with God, because He wants us to have
whole hearts that feel love and passion and courage. He wants us to be alive in
a complete and full way, to feel deeply and love deeply and care for people in
the way that He does. It’s much easier to have a heart that does not feel, or
to not allow ourselves to get involved in situations where we will have to feel
anything at all. It’s much easier to go through life not feeling anything. But that’s not really living, is it? God doesn’t want us to just go
through the motions, He doesn’t want that in our Christian walk in any way. He
wants us to be the real deal in all that we do, to mean what we say, to care
what we mean, to do things because we care about what we do. It’s not easy, but
for me it’s the only way to truly live, it’s the only way to be fully alive,
and I’ve learned that I can trust God to help me through those tougher times so
I can still be standing when the blessing comes.
Blessings,
Jannie Susan
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