The Cage
Megan Breedlove It turns out that gardening isn’t as easy as it looks.
Seems like all you should have to do would be to get a pile of dirt, put some seeds in it, cover them up with the dirt, water them occasionally, and voila. Successful garden.
Apparently, there’s more to it than that. You have to have the right kind of seeds, the right kind of soil, and the proper amount of water. You have to plant at the right time of year, too.
Actually, there’s even more to it than that, though we didn’t know it for the first few years of our garden attempts. (When I say “our”, I mean “my husband’s only”. He did all the work. My part was going to be to eat the produce.) Each year, my husband would seemingly do everything right, and each year, critters would eat the produce before it could grow to maturity. My poor husband would come into the house discouraged from looking at his garden and say something like, “Looks like the critters got it again.”
I figured our gardening attempts were doomed. After all, if you take care of the soil, water, and seed aspects, which we (I mean, he) did faithfully, and your garden got eaten, you were just plain out of luck. Or so I thought.
This year, our garden is actually on its way to being pretty successful. Lettuce and carrots are sprouting, and various shoots from whatever my husband planted are poking up out of the raised bed. And this year, we’re confident that critters won’t eat the results. In fact, we’re positive.
How can we be so sure? Because my husband built a portable cage which rests over the garden (it’s a small plot). It can be tilted away from the garden for watering purposes, then easily tilted back into place.
Ingenious, right? Yet so simple. Protect the garden, and it won’t get eaten.
It’s a seemingly obvious principle we don’t always think about, but one that, when properly applied, will afford a much greater possibility for success. And it applies to our spiritual lives, too.
Too often, we see living a Christian life as a matter of “do the right thing, and it’ll work out.” So we read our Bibles, pray occasionally, attend church, and do all the “right” things. Then we wonder why our lives don’t bear fruit.
Often, it’s because we don’t protect ourselves. We forget that being a Christian is not merely a matter of doing, but of being, and the being has to be right in order for the doing to be right. Yet we get it backwards, concentrating on the “doing” and forgetting that both are matters of the heart, and that in order to function as it should, a heart must be protected.
You know, our ribs are amazing things. They are built like a cage (which is why, of course, they are called the “rib cage”) to protect our physical heart. God designed our bodies this way because He knew our heart needed extra protection.
He designed our spiritual heart to need extra protection, too, and He made that protection easily available. The only problem is that we don’t take advantage of it. Sure, we pray, but we pray for our neighbor’s aunt’s doctor’s dog. We don’t pray about the danger crouching right at our own door. We don’t pray for our heart to be protected because we don’t realize how desperately in need of protection we are.
Or we read our Bible, but we read in order to check something off on our to-do list rather than for information on how to guard our heart.
Our enemy Satan prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone he can devour (1 Peter 5:8). Which do you think a hungry lion is more easily able to attack? Prey that is guarded and protected, or prey that is left out in the open, undefended and vulnerable?
Precious mom, are you leaving your heart unprotected? If so, you’re in spiritual danger. And if that’s you, don’t hesitate. Cry out to God right now for His protection. Do you want to have to “try again” at some point in the future because your garden didn’t work out this time?
I don’t. And neither do you. Both of us want to be successful now. And for that to happen, we must protect our heart.
Will you do it?
Proverbs 4:23—Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
