Beautiful. Violent. Garden.

This is a garden that Lea and I are working in this summer. Our friends have graciously hired us to be their grounds keepers. It is helping us to meet our financial responsibilities. Primarily it has been a beautiful, violent invitation to be together in the garden.

It is such a beautiful place. You are welcomed in through a gate that leads you into a very long entrance driveway that winds through the property. There are sections of beautiful, green lawn mixed into vast areas of landscaping with plants, trees, and rock formations with a stream that wanders all throughout it. There is even one spot where the stream crosses over the driveway and continues on the other side of the driveway, trailing through the landscape and on out of the property. As we tend and weed in the cool of the morning, cardinals sing all around and we are serenaded by the trickle of the stream as it flows next to the bank where we are perched. Lea and I commune with God, sing and worship, pray, talk and are quiet while we are in this amazingly beautiful place, offering ourselves in garden labor. Whispers of Eden. It is such a beautiful place.

It is such a violent place. Ticks. Spiders. Snakes. Thorns. Heat. Mosquitos. The beauty at times is interrupted and rivaled by a thorn stabbing into our gloved fingers, tick bites giving ongoing concern about sickness and where they are hiding in beautiful, black curls, nagging collections of mosquito bites around ankles that are so irritating, tales of snakes, stepping and crawling into tens of tens spider webs and wearing them on our faces wondering if we collected the spider on us as well, and hot, dripping, humid heat that pours from our pores. And the weed that was pulled a week ago comes raging back taunting, even when you thought you got it root and all. Whispers of Eden. It is such a violent place.

Lea and I were in the garden this morning. It was beautiful and violent. The beauty of Lea's loving life entering into the violence of my sin sick soul. Talking together about the Eden story finding its way into yesterday and today and tomorrow. The landscape of the heart is beautiful and violent. There is battle there. Weary and wooed. Weary of how hard this dying to myself is; wooed by the intimate presence of God that supersedes any human feeling and any human reality. Any human feeling. Any human reality. He supersedes it. I just looked at the definition of the word "supersede". It says, " To displace in the favor of another". He displaces and replaces with favor. He detaches violence and attaches beauty. And it is oh, so painful and oh so beautiful.

Whispers of Eden. Extravagant gift of life. Entrance of death. Raging battle. Naked and ashamed, invited to be naked and unashamed. This story isn't new. And it's new for today.

God is walking through the garden in the cool of the day. The Eden dwellers are hiding from Him because of the violence in their hearts. But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?" He knows where he is. He knows where they are. And He knows the violence in their hearts. And He calls them anyway, because He longs to be with them.

Beautiful.

There's more.