Crunchy Parts

Well, it is raining bamboo leaves right now! In the coming months the giant timber bamboo will begin to push up new shoots and leaf out again, but before that happens…off with the old! We have had several really windy days and I hadn’t realized just how bad it had gotten, until a couple of friends came over to visit the labyrinth for the first time. We could hardly see the path in a few places! So, today I started bagging up the leaves and hopefully that will get things spruced up for summer in the next week or so.

You can see on this leaf just how the bamboo leaves look before they fall. The stark contrast is amazing to me. The dying part of the leaf is striped in the opposite direction and brown, not green and it’s crunchy, not soft. Isn’t that the way of this world? Stuff that comes at us and wants to move in the door doesn’t always have such a stark contrast, tho’ does it? Sometimes it is easy for us to see that “it” is brown and not green and goes in the opposite direction of God, but other times we just don’t notice the crunchy part. I think that’s why God gave us His Word. It is tangible, readable…we just need to be teachable, ‘cuz when we don’t use God’s Word to get to know Him and learn, we limit our learning to our own experiences, yet “our” words cannot contain God.

His word is what is breathing Life into this world of ours. He brings out blooms where we didn’t anticipate, just to remind us, He’s right there. (and probably so we don’t get a big head and think we did it all by ourselves) Just like this ginger blooming...a little early and in a whole lot of shade, God's work in our lives is not diminished by the circumstances around us.

  

Don’t become partners with those who reject God. How can you make a partnership out of right and wrong? That’s not partnership; that’s war. Is light best friends with dark? Does Christ go strolling with the Devil? Do trust and mistrust hold hands? Who would think of setting up pagan idols in God’s holy Temple? But that is exactly what we are, each of us a temple in whom God lives.

God himself put it this way:

“I’ll live in them, move into them;
    I’ll be their God and they’ll be my people.
So leave the corruption and compromise;
    leave it for good,” says God.
“Don’t link up with those who will pollute you.
    I want you all for myself.
I’ll be a Father to you;
    you’ll be sons and daughters to me.”
The Word of the Master, God.

II Corinthians 6:14-16

Isn’t that beautiful? We have His Word on it, so don’t worry about the crunchy parts, He’ll show them to us and make it clear what needs to get bagged up and tossed out of our lives, His temple! Let's take Him at His Word and hand Him the rake!