How does your garden grow?

My prayer throughout the last month has been that God would continue to give me moments where I could not deny His presence.

Throughout the Spring and Summer, I daily spent time in my garden.  Sometimes hours a day as I made new flower beds and moved plants to places they'd like better.  I watered it every day without fail and closely looked at it every morning from the beginning of Spring on.  I brought the kids out constantly to show them as each plant pushed it's way through the cold ground and grew, inch by inch, until it showed it's full beauty to us in it's bloom, always giving praise to God for His creation. 

I have also used my garden as a way to teach the kids some of life's lessons. On many occasions, I talked to them about the effects of weeds in a garden.  I explained to them that if you don't pull the weeds when they are little, they multiply and eventually choke out God's beauty.  Just like sin does in our lives.  If you don't pay attention daily and get rid of it when it rears it's ugly head, it will eventually choke out God's beauty in your life. 

I LOVE my garden.  Flowers make me happy.  Anyone who has spent time with me at our home, knows this about me. Even when Samuel was hospitalized in July, I came home quickly one of the days to water my plants because I did not want them to die.  I don't tend to have a green thumb, so I have to work a little harder than some to achieve pretty flowers.  The day we found out about Rachel, I gave up on my garden.  I would look outside each day, waiting for them to wither because August has also been a really dry month, but I just couldn't muster the energy they required.  I knew flowers (& tomatoes!)  cannot survive without water.  Or so I thought....

I mentioned to Matt the other day that I had noticed that my flowers were looking pretty good for never watering them.  We also have been harvesting plenty of tomatoes - This might not be too odd with the perennials, but the annuals are definitely sensitive to abandonment.  I told him I thought this was one way God was providing for me through this because He knows how I love flowers and He knows I need some encouragement.  Well...yesterday we were coming home and on the side of the house where there is nothing but weeds (and two Spring bloomers that had already come & gone and I didn't like much)  I saw something red/pink peaking out of the tall weeds... I thought, Isaiah must have chucked a toy over there - and then I looked closer....

When Matt saw me with the camera & asked what I was doing - Desirae told him I was taking pictures of weeds...Nobody thought this was strange because they are used to me taking pictures and have learned that, that too, makes me happy. :o)  But I could not get over this!  A pretty flower growing in spite of the weeds that surrounded it. (this also reminds me of Rachel)  I have NO idea how it got there, and I don't care.  God was letting me know that when HE decides He wants HIS beauty to show, there isn't a weed big enough to choke it out.  It reminded me that He is in control and just like satan only has the power that God gives him, the weeds can only overtake what God lets them.  This also confirmed my earlier suspicion that it was Him making my waterless garden grow to love on me.  I decided to walk around the house and check out the other flowers...flowers that had stopped blooming 1 and 2 months ago, had flowers.  No joke.  We had been given a perennial with nice purple flowers on it from the church for teaching children's church last year and I put it in the ground and within days, it was withered and brown.  I figured that I had transplanted it at the wrong time and messed up it's blooming and hoped it would come back next year.  That was in June -  Yesterday that plant had nice purple blooms on it!  I was in awe.  All this time I thought my garden depended on me...God has once again gently humbled me, ever reminding me that all I need is Him.