The gardener of my heart

'I used to be dead' is such a strange but true thought.

In (On? In? During?) my last fellowship, Caleb reminded us all that life before Christ and after Christ is completely, utterly, different.

It's a bit like the structure of poems, as I was reading 'The Poem and the Journey' earlier in the day. Life before Jesus is the strophe, meeting and accepting Jesus is the volta, and life after (or rather, with) Jesus is the antistrophe. All altogether it is the beautiful poem of your life.

Previously, my heart was a garden of weeds. (like the secret garden before Mary found it again - overgrown, sad and angry and walled) There was nothing but weeds, worlds of wanwood leafmeal, the sursurrus of my own desires through it's trees and undergrowth, a mirkwood of myself.

I think sometimes people have the impression that converting to Christianity is akin to Jesus entering the garden and doing a slash-and-burn process of radical change (like the irresponsible farmers in Indonesia cursethisPSI) so that suddenly our hearts are a haze of bible verses and prayer and quoting John Piper and singing songs with our hands raised - we are no longer ourselves, we have become 'Christian robots'.

But it isn't like that. It isn't like that at all. Jesus comes in, a wanderer in the woods of our heart. The weeds resist him, tearing at his skin, the walls try to climb higher to block him. The critters that have ruled the garden for so long, making us nice-for-niceness'-sake, letting us believe we are better than another person's heart-garden, hunker down and tremble because his footsteps doesn't say 'Let me distract you with another fleeting pleasure'. It says, 'My father made this garden long ago. There are seeds here that can yield beautiful fruit. This place needs me to make it my home. I am here to stay.'

He enters, and the process begins. He pulls weeds out so the tiny flowers that were choking below can breathe again. He levels the walls so that sunlight can come in again. The flowers grow because he waters them, not because they want to outshine another garden. The trees bear fruit because of his gentle touch, not because the heart needs another distraction.

He comes to a clearing in the garden. It has always been empty. Sometimes critters came in and stayed there, building lairs of  ambition, success, sensuality, cynicism. They all moved out after a season - the clearing did not fit them, and it was left emptier than ever.

'Here I will build my tabernacle.' He says, 'Your heart is the most perfect place to be my dwelling place.'

He soothes the scars left by the scratches of the critters, he clears the rubbish, begins building his house. His person already fills the place, and the garden feels, complete.

No one knows that garden was ever the mirkwood that once existed. That place has died and an Eden lives in it's place. But it really is the same. The gardener makes all the difference.