Fiona Veitch Smith

A Gardener’s Gospel – week 6

It’s early February and I’ve just had my birthday. My husband and I are having coffee on the patio in unseasonal sunshine while our three-year-old daughter plays on her slide. The hound-from-hell, forgiven after last week’s indiscretion, is running around her 10m x 10m kingdom in a frenetic figure eight.

In my 38 years I can’t remember ever sitting in sunshine wearing a light cotton top on my birthday – in the UK anyway. The beginning of February was always a time of ice and snow, crisp grass and brave little snow drops challenging the elements. But now I look around me and see daffodils about to bloom, a rose bush that has continued to flower throughout the winter and chives that never died down. The St John’s Wort is already springing to life and I’m amazed to see some tulip stems already three inches above the soil.

Floracide

However, it’s still too soon to put away the winter duvet and I mustn’t be tempted to plant out some new seedlings. I did that a couple of years ago. I’d taken some cuttings from someone else’s jasmine and had been growing it very successfully indoors. At the first sign of spring I rushed into the garden and planted it near my washing line – three days later winter returned and froze the poor thing to death. Well, at least I thought it had. I left it in the ground as a reminder of my floracidal tendencies and would lambaste myself every time I saw it. Then, late last summer, that which I thought was dead, began to come to life again! It has continued to grow through the winter; there are no flowers yet, but I can’t wait until it starts to bloom. Then finally I can forgive myself.

Letting go

Once again the parallels with my spiritual life are obvious. I hold onto past failings and struggle to forgive myself. It seems that I can forgive others far more easily than I can forgive myself. If I’m honest, I probably once thought this a bit of a virtue: how noble of me to extend grace to others while facing up to my own sin. But facing up means letting go. What I’m really doing is continuing to sin. It’s my pride that refuses to let go. The only reason I hang on to how I’ve failed is because secretly I believe that I’m better than that. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to behave in such a way and if I try just a bit harder it won’t happen again.

And yet God knows that I’m not better than that. I am a sinner and he loves me anyway. He forgives me not because he knows I can do better, but because he knows that without his life-giving presence it is all that I am. If killing jasmine was a sin God would have forgiven me even if the poor plant had never come back to life. How different from me who feels better because now I believe that I never really failed at all.

Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground. For it is time to seek the Lord until he comes and showers righteousness on you. But you have planted wickedness, you have reaped evil, you have eaten the fruit of deception because you have depended on your own strength.
Hosea 10:12 – 13

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