Tilling Over

“Jesus assumed our flesh; let us give him our own. In this way he can come into the world and transform it.” -Pope Benedict XVI

In a way I take Him everywhere with me.
He is my hands when I hold and comfort a crying child, stroking the hair, wiping the tear dampened cheeks. He is my feet when I walk along the peaceful mountain places and also when I tread the bustling city streets.
Sometimes He takes me to places of quiet, sometimes places of mess and noise and dischord. Other times I am lead to a place of joy, and at other times a place of suffering.

Maybe this is what, a life lived for Him, with Him and through Him becomes. A transformation that begins with me and ends with Him.

Just as a seed holds the blossoming tree so we, each one of us, hold the kingdom in our hearts. And it is from the heart that we are led.

It seems that Jesus often sought out the difficult ways and the narrow ways, the deep valleys and the back streets of the lost and broken before the high, transendant peaks of this world.

He went to the depths of life so He might illuminate them, redeem them, raise them up to the heights in his own resurrected body.

Still, must I, at times follow even here? Beyond my comfort zone. Beyond myself.

Must I step out into a bright light and open space I don't recognise? Become vulnerable?

Like the winter trees striped of their leaves. Simple, naked silhoettes embracing the stark, frozen sunlight of late November.

I like symmetry, order, comfort. I like to design a situation I can plan, regulate and control.
Sometimes it is hard for me to take His hand in mine.
When He comes in the form of a stranger who may upset my routine, or a sick and sleepless child, a messy chore I‘d prefer to leave for tomorrow, or a lonely neighbour, I would rather visit some other time. I begin to loosen my grasp. I busy my empty hands with my own tasks instead of His.

I try to make Him live through me, through my limited, awkward, unyielding body.

Instead of simply letting myself live through Him. Through His limitless, given and graceful form.

I find myself too busy and troubled to simply sit at His feet as Mary did. And seek His still voice in the whisper.
The whisper that can lead me so very gently to the places I really need to be and to the things I really need to do.
To hear a whisper takes a quiet and yielded heart.

Yet oftentimes I clatter around with my dust pan and brush, my dish cloth and scourer looking to clean up the corners, make things look tidy. Even if only in my mind.
Though maybe it’s the messy parts are what I have to get my hands dirty with at times. Embrace in fact.
The difficult places, the narrow roads.
To dig deep into the earth of life where the rot and decay can be over turned, to give life to new shoots. There is growth in the mess of it all, glory in fact, in the opportunity to turn goodness out of a little dirt.

Hard work, tiredness, the monotony of chores, sickness, the crying child, the untidy rooms, the needy and lonely ones I neglect to call on, the unkind comment someone made the other day that still lingers, are all opportunities to dig deep and plant a seed.

A seed that can be planted in my own heart first.

A place where the noonday sunlight of hope and the gentle watering of faith upon that seed may, in time, pollenate a whole garden of budding blossoms.
It is a strange yet beautiful fact of nature that it is only when the flowers have past their bloom and are about to fade and wither that they become most fruitful. For it is not in the beauty of the unfurled petals that they hold their life. It is from their very heart that they release their seed. Their hope of new life.

The soil of my own expectations is constantly being tilled over.
His order and beauty is grown from the earth up; from the depths of the soil to the heights of the heavenly kingdom.

"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;" Ephesians 3:18

And during the times when the hard clay of all my pride and selfishness is softened to a fine rich soil, my own limitations are over come by His limitless.

You drench its furrows and level its ridges;you soften it with showersand bless its crops.
Psalm 65:

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Does the farmer plow continually to plant seed? Does he continually turn and harrow the ground? Does he not level its surface And sow dill and scatter cummin And plant wheat in rows, Barley in its place and rye within its area? For his God instructs and teaches him properly.
Isaiah 28

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... For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall be tilled and sown ...
Eziekiel 36

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For the earth that drinketh in the rain which cometh often upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is tilled, receiveth blessing from God
Hebrews 6 >>

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the ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that sowe the seed: and the mountains shall drop sweetness, and every hill shall be tilled ... Amos 9:13