My son and his wife are expecting their first baby any day now, (my first grandchild).
You might have heard of the nesting instinct. Does that include the garden? Perhaps it’s a male version of the nesting phenomenon.
Their lawn has always been very poor with dead grass and humps and bumps, so about 2 weeks before the due date he decides to dig up the old lawn and lay a new one. The question was whether to reseed or to lay turf.
Reseeding would be cheaper but would take longer to establish, and with the famous Bill in residence, it would be difficult to keep protected from damage.
The decision therefore was to lay new turf.
Help, (me) was drafted in to rake over the recently rotavated ground, pick out all the old grass, stones and rubble, and to level and flatten the ground. Good old Alan Titchmarsh showed us how to shuffle and prepare the ground.
I was doing fine, so I thought, until my son declared I was not shuffling correctly but creating furrows. He duly set out with what looked like some weird dance routine and the ground was eventually, after several “rakings and shufflings”, levelled satisfactorily.
In our faith how well do we prepare the ground? Do we carefully remove the dead grass and unnecessary rocks? How well do we “level the ground”, even if it takes time and effort?
One thing we can be sure of is that if we remove those things that are no longer growing, and discard the rocks that we stumble over, the ground we have to work on will be more level ready for the lush green growth of having Jesus in our life.
Prayer: Jesus help us to recognise when we need to remove the weeds and dead grass from our lives. Help us to discard those things that we stumble over, and be with us in our “shufflings” so that we can be fully and properly prepared for the new growth you promise in us. AMEN