thank God I am not The Gardener

I decided, despite my lack of knowledge and ability in gardening, that I wanted to plant some flowers with my daughter. So with my hubby's help, we picked a nice sunny spot, dug some holes, and planted the seeds. And I try to remember to water them, fairly often. To be honest, I didn't really have very high expectations that anything was going to come of it. I just figured that since I had no idea what I was doing that I would somehow hinder the poor little flowers from ever amounting to anything more than a little seed buried in some dirt. Much to my elated surprise, we found signs of life this morning! A pretty good amount of little sprouts poking up from the ground, undeterred by my forgetfulness and sadly flawed attempt to 'take care' of them.

                                            Sunflower                         Zinnia

Morning Glory

Through this simple little experience God is revealing to me a couple of very valuable life lessons. The first, though it's one that's been drilled into my head ever since I was little girl, it still is not an easy concept to grasp and is one I struggle with on a daily basis: God can and will still use me regardless of how badly I feel like I am blowing it. Not only in spite of my flaws does He use me but along with them! There are certain things that He is calling me to do that the only way I am even capable or qualified to be handling them is because of the things I have experienced. The mistakes that I've made, so to speak. 

Again, this is not a new concept. We speak of it all the time. How God takes our most epic failures and biggest blunders and then turns around and creates them into something beautiful. But how often do we really practice what we preach? I know for me, when I am struggling with something my immediate reaction is definitely not "Oh, goodie I messed up real bad but it's OK because God is going to use it somehow!" Obviously that's not really an appropriate response but neither is the way I really handle it. Most of the time, I just want to hide away and wallow in my self-pity of being a flawed human who honestly, just plain sucks sometimes. 

You want to know what's awesome about me sucking, though? It's that it really doesn't matter at all how much I suck because ultimately, just like the fate of the little flower, it's up to God. And He not only knows what He's doing but He's The professional, there's no one better. He also is fully aware of my suckiness and not only loves me anyways but somehow still finds me useful, as well. You see, because I am not God I have no idea what's going on beneath the surface and really, I don't need to know. My calling is just to be obedient to Him by lovingly planting the seeds when, where and how He tells me to. It's not my job to save people, and if it were, my name would be Jesus, not Jordyn. 

The other lesson these little sprouts have taught me is that I can completely relate to them. I can identify with the little soon-to-be flower, hiding under the surface, fighting for life, ready to bloom. Trying to push it's way up out of the ground and come out into the open. As cheesy as that sounds, it's the absolute truth. When I finally do make my debut and am standing tall with my beautiful, colorful pedals and the Sun's shining down on me, I can only hope and pray that I don't forget where I came from. That I remember to point to the sky and not take credit for His handiwork. After-all I had absolutely nothing to do with what I had become anymore than a flower controls it's destiny. Only that God saw me, this little speck in the dirt and could see something in me that I didn't even know existed and by watering and carefully pruning, He brought that out of me, to use for His glory.