transforming our garden

First thing this morning my companion and I went on what seemed like a jungle exploration. In reality, we offered service cleaning an overgrown yard. We were loaded with tools and supplies to help us on this adventure and then sent on our own to finish what seemed like and impossible task. A beautiful garden overloaded by weeds, and trash that soon was transformed into something of better use. 

Our lives are like gardens. Sometimes taken over by weeds, shrubs, dirt and many other things that seem to distract us or tear us down. Heavenly Father is the Gardener. He uses his own tools to help de-weed, and transform us. Gloves, clippers, rakes, and trash bags, hold nothing against the Spiritual tools used in our lives everyday. Spiritual tools like humility, hope, faith, repentance, love and many others. He can take any type of raw material and make it into something new and beautiful. We must be submissive and allow our lives to be in harmony with His will. 

Elder D. Todd Christofferson  recently shared a story illustrating this. "President Hugh B. Brown, provided a personal experience. He told of purchasing a rundown farm in Canada many years ago. As he went about cleaning up and repairing his property, he came across a currant bush that had grown over six feet (1.8 m) high and was yielding no berries, so he pruned it back drastically, leaving only small stumps. Then he saw a drop like a tear on the top of each of these little stumps, as if the currant bush were crying, and thought he heard it say:

“How could you do this to me? I was making such wonderful growth. … And now you have cut me down. Every plant in the garden will look down on me. … How could you do this to me? I thought you were the gardener here.”

President Brown replied, “Look, little currant bush, I am the gardener here, and I know what I want you to be. I didn’t intend you to be a fruit tree or a shade tree. I want you to be a currant bush, and someday, little currant bush, when you are laden with fruit, you are going to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down.’”

Years later, President Brown was a field officer in the Canadian Army serving in England... [He] was in line to be promoted to general, and he was summoned to London. But even though he was fully qualified for the promotion, it was denied him because he was a Mormon...What President Brown had spent 10 years hoping, praying, and preparing for slipped through his fingers...Continuing his story, President Brown remembered:

“I got on the train and started back … with a broken heart, with bitterness in my soul. … When I got to my tent, … I threw my cap on the cot. I clenched my fists, and I shook them at heaven. I said, ‘How could you do this to me, God? I have done everything I could do to measure up. There is nothing that I could have done—that I should have done—that I haven’t done. How could you do this to me?’ I was as bitter as gall.

“And then I heard a voice, and I recognized the tone of this voice. It was my own voice, and the voice said, ‘I am the gardener here. I know what I want you to do.’ The bitterness went out of my soul, and I fell on my knees by the cot to ask forgiveness for my ungratefulness. …

“… And now, almost 50 years later, I look up to [God] and say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for cutting me down, for loving me enough to hurt me.’”

Our Heavnely Father loves us and we might not like the changes we have to make to be pruned and trimmed but they make us what He needs us to be.  He knows the what, where, when, where, and why of our lifes, or shall I say our gardens. It's hard work. Nothing comes easy. But the more we submitt to His will, the easier it seems to become. "For the natural man is an enemy to God... and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." (Mosiah 3:19)