From Briars to Blooms: How my Home and Heart is Changing

Nathan and I bought our first home almost two years ago. God gave us a piece of land in a place where, as my father-in-law says, receives yesterday's sunshine. The fourteen acres provides a plenty of wide-open space for the horses. Just one problem...it looked like a barren wasteland. Our piece of land needed much love. The three-year-old, barely-lived-in house was in good condition, but the land was nothing but dirt and weeds. Reality (contrasting our whimsical dream) set in as I stared out of our window during the first month in our oh-so-humble abode looking at sand, clay, thorny vines, and sweet-gum trees. A "work-in-progress" to say the least.

First things first...Nathan's parents (my amazing in-laws) came and bush hogged (mowed the weeds), dug fence post holes, and built fence. Did I mention their amazing? "This place will be beautiful," Denise told me. "Beautiful?" I thought to myself, "well...um...uh...The fencing looks really nice." Then came problem number two...I'm afraid of the dark. And man it gets dark in the country...and quiet too!

I decided within in the first month of living there that in my heart I'm really a city girl helplessly in love with a cowboy! I began to scheme how maybe we could own two properties...a little apartment in the beautifully tame Peachtree City and keep our wild country place as a weekend home. Problem number three: in no way on this earth do we have that kind of money!

Our fourteen acres are slowly...slowly changing. Did I mention the process is slow? But now, two years later, I look out my window to see grassy pastures (well for the most part). The brush piles of pushed-down Sweet Gum trees are slowly burning away. We have the frame of our barn. And the latest, landscaping in the front yard: Loropetalums, Knock-out roses, Crape Myrtles, Holly Carissa, Azaleas! Our lawn is growing greener and greener with each rain (with who knows what kind of grass and I really don't care as long as it's green). Now I enjoy sitting on my front porch early in the morning. I think about what Denise said almost two years ago: "This place will be beautiful." 

God is working in me much like "we" are working on our land (Nathan always quotes his dad saying that "We" is his French name). My Master...the Master Gardener of my heart...is cultivating its soil. And I'm changing. Jesus taught in parables in Matthew 13. He told of a farmer sowing seed into three different kinds of soil. One area was thorny. Jesus said, "And the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the work, and it becomes unfruitful." That's been me...pretty thorny. Season by season God has been killing off weeds of fear, weeds of control, weeds of doubt, weeds of "measuring-up". These weeds were thick and thorny. But with them gone...I can breathe again. Praise God! In the place of those weeds now I can bear fruit again!

Oh but I'm learning one more thing. Just because you kill the thorny weeds one time doesn't mean they won't grow back. My home and heart was and will be, forever on this earth, a beautiful work in progress!