This summer is going at the same speed as life – faster than fast! I’m not imagining things. Within the span of just 15 days the pizza garden container that my wife Kimberly planted for the patio garden article in this issue of ripen – a gardening lifestyle magazine has grown like crazy. Compare the 2 pictures and see for yourself. That’s fast! We just celebrated our grandson’s first birthday and we were all saying, “It’s seems like just yesterday…” And – something else happened last summer – my mother passed at age 82. All of this; birth, gardens growing and death got me thinking a lot lately about just how fast life is. There’s a rhythm to life. If you’re going to have a lifestyle that is filled with passion and purpose you need to be in sync with God’s rhythm of learn, do and be.
DAY 1 Pizza Garden Container
DAY 15 Pizza Garden Container
TRAIN CHILDREN IN GOD’S WAYS SO AS THEY GROW THEY’LL KNOW IT
That’s my paraphrase of the Bible verse admonishing parents to be active in raising their children in all God’s wisdom. Why can my grandchildren and children garden? It’s simply because my parents and grandparents taught me. This is basic Bible wisdom – it’s the very model of God for humanity. Training is hard work. It’s painful lessons. It’s repetition – dirty, sweaty, back breaking repetition. It’s learning but it’s especially discovering often through beautiful revelation. It’s a desire – a passion, to want to discover, get better and not just know how to do something but fully KNOW that something– in your soul. You may have heard people talk about being one with nature, and it is that – but it’s so much more. To learn to know is the magic in the spiritual journey of daily life. It’s the glorious wonder in the relationship between student and teacher, disciple and pastor, child and parent. If you’re in the season of the learning rhythm be silent even with yourself and be content with confidence that God is doing a good work in you.
THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT
There comes a time (and it actually come rather quickly) when you’re primary responsibility isn’t to learn but to do. You’ve likely heard the saying, Do as I say, not what I do. It’s an adage to encourage others, “Don’t make the same mistakes I made, do better.” It’s generally well intentioned but I think it can also be an unintentional compromise – a flub on humility – an easy slide into doing YOU when God demands that we do it His way. To DO is to lead, have patience and drive work with purposeful tenacity. That kind of doing requires the utmost in Godly humility. When you’re in this season and it’s show time you can’t be shy but you must always be gracious. To truly do the art of doing takes prayer and total dependence on God and that’s why unfortunately so many people DO a lot less than they could and never discover their full potential. The Bible offers us some clear instruction in how to DO. Let all you do be done in love – love the work, others and God with passion and purpose.
TO BE AND THE GREAT I AM
The BE phase of the rhythm of life I think is a season we could all get into sooner than we do. It’s a time where learning and doing meld into a really amazing form of communion with God. To simply BE wonderfully gets past any pretentious need to prove ourselves. It helps us move beyond what we understood for so long to be our wants and needs into the joy of what God wants and needs of us. It lets us communicate a greater passion and demonstrate a deeper purpose. In, The Mystery and Complexity of the State of Being, artist-philosopher Graham Collier quotes Einstein, ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle.’ If ever God spoke to us in the clearest of terms of perhaps one of the greatest mysteries – He himself, he told us his name: I Am!
I believe a gardening lifestyle is a God-engineered, very effective way for us to experience our I Am. I know it was for my mom. She had learned and she had done AND she had for many years been in the season of ‘being’. Near the end of her life she would often ask for and I would often play the Chris Renzema song, Springtime (below). As I write this to you I’ve come to realize that she wasn’t listening to it just because she thought it was beautiful. She was listening to it with a deeper knowing that to BE in Christ is more than passion and more than purpose it is God fusing together a new and divine passion and purpose. Let us all say, ‘Yes God I want to be in sync with your rhythm to learn, do and be. I want to both will and to do your good pleasure.’
There’s passion and there’s purpose and then there’s ‘passion AND Purpose’.
Grow deep in Christ,
Brad Bloom, Publisher
