Cows, Gardens, and Life.

So picture this, I'm just closing my Bible, shutting off my light and crawling into bed when all of a sudden I hear outside my window a bunch of stampeding cows and a mooing and bellowing like you never did hear. A moment  later my mother calls up the stairs, "Boys, the cows are out!" and off we go into the night to try and chase around 200 cow/calf pairs back into some sort of fenced in area.

As I was finishing my devotions and getting ready for sleep, I had been struck with a revelation of how my garden is a very accurate reflection of my life. From a distance it looks quite good, all the vegetables are doing well and everything is looking like it is going to yield a bountiful harvest. It appears that there are few weeds or rocks and the soil is rich, dark and loose. Closer inspection, however, reveals a different picture. The walkways between the rows are mostly void of weeds, however a few small things have cropped up that need to be dealt with swiftly before they become too big of a problem. The seemingly nice clear borders of the garden from the lawn are not quite as clear cut as they looked from a distance, there is a bit of a blurred zone that can roughly be described as the edge. There are a few rows that instead of being kept free of weeds, have instead been covered with lawn clippings, underneath this neat covering the soil is infested with weeds and a few have become so big that they have pushed through the clippings and dominate their immediate garden space, it is too much effort however to move the clippings to remove the weeds so the problem is just left to fester. The worst part of the garden however only comes to light under intense scrutiny of the rows themselves. In among the vegetable plants, sneaky weeds have grown up and are so intertwined with the crop that if they were to be removed, the vegetables would also be uprooted and perish.

Now, it doesn't take much thought as to how this can metaphorically apply to my own (or any other honest person's) life. I generally take care to present a good outward appearance to the world, sending an image that all is well with my life and I am doing ok. On closer inspection of my character however, problems start showing themselves. I tend to be lax about being constantly vigilant for new sins that pop up and usually wait until they are just beginning to be noticeable enough to ruin my good impression before dealing with them. I have allowed the border to become fuzzy between the sacred and profane, allowing myself a good deal of gray area on what I'm allowed to do and still remain within a "Christian" context. Some of my biggest sins I don't even bother to deal with, I just trust the old cover up that has worked for years, blind to the fact that some of my sin has grown so big that my facade is no longer working. But all is well right? I'm still producing a big harvest of "fruit" (in this case, veggies). But actually if I examine my motives for much of the righteous acts that I do, I find that they are inseparable from the sin that is so thoroughly intertwined with them at the root. I can't remove the impure motive without also destroying the act itself, so like the parable in Luke, I will have to wait until the harvest, gather the good fruit and burn the weeds.
Now, some of you may be wondering, oh that's all well and good, but why the heck did you mention your little rodeo adventure tonight, what possible relevance does this have to the above story? Well, recently I have been reading a book called, When the Kingdom Comes by Steve Gray, the pastor of World Revival Church in Kansas City. Some friends of mine attend that church and the power of the Spirit is apparently amazing there. I've been struggling with this idea of revival, I want it, but at the same time I don't; Paul's old flesh and spirit war I suppose. It's been slowly dawning on me, or rather, I have been remembering an old lesson, that to have revival one must be broken. We have been made alive in Christ, but often we allow a resurgence of the sinful nature and we sink back into a coma of apathy and sin. We must be revived by the Spirit and that can only happen when we have been broken of that sin nature that keeps striving for dominance. The last couple of days I have been getting to the point of brokenness but every time I'm coming close something in  me will fight to maintain my autonomy, this time it is quite the battle and I have been rather frustrated and yet at peace, so strange I know. Tonight's prison break of the cattle reminded me that sometimes situations arise that come and trample and break us. Those cows came and stampeded right through our garden, I couldn't seen the extent of the damage in the dark but the corn looked a little beat up and I could smell crushed onions in the air. In the morning (well, probably on Monday actually), one of us will go out there, clean things up and put that garden back into order, taking the time while we're at it to carefully weed the garden and getting it looking good again. Disasters will come, and only then, in that moment of brokenness are we open to revival, only then can the Spirit lift us up again, by no act of us, but all by the will of God.