A Note about Gardens

A little over a year ago I went on a women's retreat. My mom was the women's ministry director of our church at the time and I had helped her plan the whole thing. I was excited to see something that we had worked so hard on come to fruition, but honestly, I wasn't expecting to get too much out of the weekend spiritually. I was more focused on everything running smoothly, helping my mom in whatever way she needed, and keeping everyone happy. Little did I know, the Lord was going to do some work on my heart.

Colleen Searcy was our guest speaker for the weekend. She is an amazing women of God with such wisdom and grace. She works closely with Jen Wilkin at The Village Church in Texas. A large part of Colleen's talks focused on the garden plots the Lord has placed in our lives and finding joy in the boundaries of those gardens.

Here's the thing about garden plots; they change. There are seasons of preparing and planting, seasons of growing, and seasons of harvest. The cycle continues in that way as the garden plots change. Colleen compared our spheres of life to those garden plots and challenged us to write out what the current garden plots of our lives were.

Another thing about garden plots is that they are just that; plots. They are confined to a certain area. Maybe some are bigger than others, but they all have boundaries. Colleen helped us to think through the boundaries in each of our gardens and challenged us to find ways to embrace those boundaries and see them as protections for our joy and delight. God has given us the garden plots we have for a reason and he has placed boundaries around them for our protection. 

We all have different gardens in our lives. Some of us may be working in the same kind of garden and some of us may be working in completely different gardens. No matter what our gardens look like, there are always boundaries and boundaries are hard. We tend to think our boundaries are way more difficult than someone else's and instead of examining our boundaries and looking for the joy and protection that they can bring, we look at everyone else's gardens and wish we could have theirs. The obvious is going to happen when we stare longingly at our friend's garden instead of lovingly tending to our own. It's going to die. We will be so focused on getting out of the garden we are in that we won't be able to honor the Lord by seeing the beauty and gift of the garden He has given us. 

So friend, what gardens has the Lord entrusted to you right now? What are the boundaries around those gardens? Choose to see the gift and joy they can be instead of staring longingly at your neighbor’s garden. You are right where you are meant to be.