"Finish your outdoor work and get your fields ready; after that, build your house." ~Solomon
Everything about growing vegetables and having a garden is a joy to me. The smell of the soil and the sight of a seed has the magic to carry my thoughts all the way back to the garden of Eden. Once I plant that first seed or pull that first weed, time ceases to exist for me. Hours feel like minutes as I enter into the process that generations of humans have performed for food. It's an eternal and peaceful place.
Since gardening is such a joy for me, for the longest time I would use it as a reward for getting my less joyful work done. I would tell myself that only after the bathroom was clean should I go out and work on the veggies. The house came first. Dishes, vaccuuming, housework, laundry and the countless other household chores could not be left undone. It didn't take long for the immediate chores to poison my time in that peaceful place. It became hard to shrug the guilt of a dirty floor and enter the peace of repetitive tending. Soon I found myself longing for the garden when I was scrubbing and wishing I had finished one more chore in the house while I was gardening. I no longer had joy in either place.
It was into this time in my life that the Holy Spirit smacked me with this verse. I felt like I had been given permission by God himself to do the thing I loved the most first. Do your outside work and THEN your housework. I had gotten those things backward. Both were jobs that needed to be done so switching the order shouldn't have made a difference, but it did. When I work in the garden and enter that timeless place with the eternal God, the housework somehow takes less time. It all gets done with joy instead of a sense of bondage and I went from singing the blues to singing praises!
"But what was sown on good soil is the man who hears the word and understands it." ~Jesus
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