More than the Flowers

I look around and all I see is dirt,

But the promise of new life teems just below the surface

This garden was burned to make the soil all the sweeter

More nourishing though it felt like a drought

More promising though the earth looked cracked and broken

I’ll never understand how everything is upside down in the world God created

The first last

And the last first

And this garden proof, that what looks empty and barren can bring forth more than it had before

This is the in-between where we hope against hope

That maybe it could be true, even though we don’t feel the rumble under our feet

That something could break forth any minute

And another thing

And another

Wild things with different stems and hand-painted colors, painted by the hand of a God who was in this garden long before I was

We forgot that He’s a God of time, who takes his time

Who will do the deep work

Will get His hands dirty

Would we really have it any other way?

Would we want a god whose hands were clean?

Who never touched us? Dirty as we were for all our digging in this garden for the old—old sins, old patterns, but yes, also old memories. He understands.

And yes, he dirties Himself for us, isn’t afraid of sitting next to us in the soil, in the dirt that turned to mud from our tears

If only we could see the whole garden He sees

One with vines climbing the old stone wall that has the door in it, where he knocked that first time

The handle’s gotten old and rusty now and maybe falls off the wood a bit, but he’ll fix that too

When I see the dirt, he sees the garden about to burst forth. It might look different than I expected, but always meticulously planned. Accounting for all my mistakes and doubts and wrong turns. Nothing left untouched, nothing unseen

The beds are ready, the stakes are in the ground, the birdbath is filled with water

There’s a lone robin on the branch above that has always sung its song

She has not let weather stop her nor the conditions beneath the branch she sits on deter her from singing the song she was given by the same God who fixes the rusted door handle, sits in the dirt with us, prunes what needs to be pruned, waits for the fresh soil to produce what He intended. Something more beautiful than I can imagine. And he never left me there, He’s waited too

Somehow, the company has become more to me than the flowers