Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17 (KJV)

I got my love for flowers from my mother. She gave me advice on where and how to plant different types of flowers to enhance their growth and where they could be most appreciated. I appreciated her advice because I wanted my garden to be filled with color, fragrance and beauty.

Though I appreciated her advice, there were other areas where I didn’t always follow advice; I thought I knew what was best for my life and I made many mistakes in my lifetime. First of all, I wasn’t a Christian until later in life. As a result of living 40 years without Christ in my life, I wandered aimlessly in the desert making wrong choices and following wrong passions. The garden of my heart was filled with wrong ideas and desires; weeds choking the beauty that could have come from my heart if I had allowed Christ to enter my life earlier. I looked for love in the wrong places. I looked for advice in the wrong places. I looked for peace in all the wrong places. But somewhere deep in my heart I knew there was a huge hole. I would sit, alone, in the back row of churches throughout the years, hungering for something that would fill that hole.

One day, however, Christ did enter my heart…more about that later. That deserves a devotional all of its own. Suddenly, but not all at once, the “sun” was beginning to shine on my heart garden and blossoms were beginning to open as they made their way through the weeds and the once dry soil. The Living Water and the Son were nurturing my heart; nourishing it and making it pliable and easier to pull the weeds that tried to entangle themselves around the seeds that were beginning to take root. My heart garden needs to be weeded on a regular basis but one day it will be finished and it will reach it’s ultimate and eternal beauty and there will be no more weeds to pull.