Cultivating Hope

I couldn't take it one more day. Each time I looked out onto the back patio, the dead, rotting leaves, slimy brown witch-hair-looking grasses and fallen tree branches from the winter's storms reminded me that I have been so caught up with my new teaching job that I have left certain areas of my life to fall into disrepair. My family still gets my love, but some days it's all I can do to just get dinner on the table, snuggle on the couch for a few minutes, and then fall unconscious into my bed to do it all again the next day. The dust bunnies are collecting out of reach under the tables and couch, reminding me of how long it's been since I really deep-cleaned when I fish out a toy car or ball out along with a wad of dust and lint so big we should name it and feed it. I used to be better at this, I tell myself. This is a busy season of learning a new job, researching, lesson planning, wanting to be good at what I do. It's okay, it will get better. But sometimes I need to make a difference I can see right away; today it was that atrocious back patio garden. I grabbed my gloves, a huge plastic tub, and worship music on my headphones, and hit it. The slimy mess I was suddenly in up to my elbows had the smell of moldy vegetables and looked even worse. I pulled out handful after smelly handful of rotting grasses, growing surer by the minute that I was probably going to need to dig out the offending plant and start over in the spring with something new. However, when I had removed the dead mass of stringy, rotting leaves, underneath and just barely peeking out of the winter soil were the fresh new shoots that were just waiting to get a little light and air. The immediate correlation to my tired, winter-weary body and tangled-up mind was so clear and sweet, and coincided perfectly with the song resounding in my head from the earbuds: "Come alive, come alive." My eyes, ears, and heart came together to wrap me in this perfect sense of wholeness, of beauty in my story and what God is doing in my life. He is ready to strip away the weariness, the anxiety of not being good enough, the wondering what will be next. He is pulling out the dead and tired and faded pieces of me and reviving the joy, the passion, the excitement in fulfilling a purpose. He is doing a new thing in my heart. He is not interested in throwing me away and starting again with something new; He is making me new. Like many of you, I am choosing a word that will be my theme for the year in my Bible studies and prayer, and I believe I have settled on "cultivate." I am ready to allow God to cultivate in me the fruit of His Spirit, like love, joy, peace, and patience. I am ready to cultivate an attitude of worship in my daily life, and habits that support that, like reading (or listening, thanks to my Bible app) my Bible daily, and listening to praise music on my way home from work to put me in a better frame of mind to care for my family. My hope for you this year is that you will allow God to work in the garden of your heart, to cultivate something beautiful out of whatever tangled mess, like mine, that you have to start with. He is ready to renew and restore you to your intended beauty, as his beloved. "Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." John 15:4 "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:16-18