Monthly Archives: December 2019

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Welcome to Twenty-twenty!

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          We are now entering a new year! No matter how wise, learned or educated we may be, none of us can accurately predict the future. So we are all entering the unknown. For us personally, the year 2019 was the “year of the funeral” with so many of our friends and relations passing away. Some we were sure of their destiny,  as they had followed the Lord openly for many years; others we were not sure of….good people yes, but  never having made a public commitment in Christians things; and others quite openly saying they had lived without God and they were going to die without Him!

   Some of the deceased went very suddenly and unexpectedly while others contracted cancer and fought it for a while until the doctors could do no more for them. One of our friends was with us in church one Sunday morning apparently in as good health as he had ever enjoyed, and then by the next Sunday he was buried and lying in the cemetery!  Some were older and had very poor health and we felt it was a blessed release for them.

    Death has no favourites, nor does it have to give any warning. This is why it is so important to be prepared in every way….legally with all affairs put in order, and spiritually to ensure our eternal destiny. In this life, we have real concept of how long eternity is. Everything in this life has an end, just as it has had a beginning, but in eternity, there is no end. Whichever state we find ourselves in, will be for ever and ever with no doorway out.

   So it pays to be prepared, then  we can enter this new year with confidence and leave our loved ones with a certain knowledge of where we are going.

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Tough Things to Learn.

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       I wrote for the last two weeks, of my experiences in training roses to grow straight and tall to make standard mop-top rose bushes. There are so many lessons that we can learn from the unpleasant things that come our way in our lives, and yet how beneficial they can be to us in the long run! It brought to mind the experience of a friend of mine who had this hard lesson to learn early in her married life…..

     She and her new husband had had a severe  disagreement over something, so she flounced off back to her mother expecting to find some sympathy. But her mother was a very wise woman, and after listening to her daughter’s story and grievances, she said, “My dear you can’t stay here now. This isn’t your home any more. You chose to live with your husband and you are going to have to go back to him before dark. But come and have a cup of tea before you leave!”

   So the young woman sat down with her hot drink and calmed down enough to go back to her new home with one lesson learned. She had made her choice and had to abide by it. Of course she loved her husband, but she was going to show him a thing or two, she thought. Instead, it was she who needed to learn a lesson or two!

   Then when she got home, she found that the door was locked! It didn’t matter how much she knocked and banged on the door, it stayed firmly shut. She wasn’t even sure if her husband was at home. So she sat down in the porch nursing her angry thoughts. She couldn’t go back to her mother….she had made that very clear. And now she couldn’t get into her home either. The door just stayed locked with no movement inside.

   Finally her husband relented and unlocked the door so she could go in. She had learned her second lesson well, and never again did she allow her temper get the better of her. It took tough measures for her to learn these two lessons, and it is the same for the roses that find themselves tied straight to a stake with their other laterals cut off to make them look up. It takes these tough lessons for us to learn these things too, but as we yield to our Master Gardener, so He can make something beautiful of our lives. We learn to look up into His face to help us overcome our petty hurt feelings and say, “Not my will, but may Yours be done!”

Life Lessons

Reaching for the Sky!

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    As I said last week, I’ve been trimming and tying up the young rose cuttings from last year, and imagining a conversation I could have had with one of them. The particular rose in the photo had one long strong branch coming out of the main stem, reaching out to the side. It’s head wasn’t particularly strong looking and certainly wasn’t a good shape. So I picked the strong stalk up and tied it firmly  into an upright position onto the stake.

“Ouch!” exclaimed the rose, “That hurts!”

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, “But this is how I want you to grow. I want you to look up and grow into a taller plant with your head on higher things.”

The rose got a bit sulky at that and muttered, “I wanted to grow my branches out low, down to the ground because that’s how I would be if you weren’t watching me. After all, I AM a carpet rose you know!”

    I looked further along the row and saw a rose that I had trained a few years earlier. It is tall, with a bushy head  looking up to the sky, and is covered with flowers being a thing of beauty and joy to everyone who sees it.

 “Do you see that rose over there?” I asked the one I was dealing with, “That’s how you will look  too in a couple of years time. You will be able to have other flowers growing beneath your branches instead of being a tangled mess lying on the ground with other branches growing all over the place. You are a good strong plant and have great potential if you obey my pruning and staking!”

“I suppose so,” sighed the one I was dealing with, “But it’s not very nice being tied up tight like this. It hurts when you take my little side branches off too!”

“It’ all for your own good, my dear,” I said, “and you will thank me for it one day!”

   This little story has an application that we should all take to heart. It is only as we respond to the tying and staking of the Master Gardener in our life, and lift our heads to look up into His face that we will be able to reach our full potential that He plans for us. Yes, there will be experiences that we could well do without, but if we remember that He always knows what is best and can see the wider plan, we can take it all happily and rest in knowing His love for us.

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Excuse me a Moment!

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I am finding that this web site has updated itself past me! So I am going to have a little play around on it to see if I can get my pictures back on track as they seem to have disappeared on me!

But I’m finding there are other things that this update can do that I am not familiar with. So bear with me a little longer.

Life Lessons

Pruning in our Lives.

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I have recently been trimming up my small rose plants which I have grown from cuttings. Most of them are doing well and have started to flower, making a cheerful splash of colour in the garden. But I want more than that from them….I want them to grow taller with a strong head on them so they stand up instead of sprawling all over the ground as they would if left alone. So I have to keep taking off the lower side shoots, and if there is a very strong shoot near the top, I tie it up to the stake to train it to be the main stem for the new head. As I have been doing this, I think of the parallels in our Christian life. If I’m left to my own ways, I will grow close to the ground and sprawl all over it just becoming a tangled mess. So the Master Gardener has to keep taking off those bad habits and selfish desires to keep us growing low to the ground. We need to have the painful experiences of life to make us look up into His face, and ask what He wants from us. This is how we will grow tall and straight with a strong head of flowers on us to give pleasure to all those around us. I suppose taking the shoots off the roses causes them pain, and many of the experiences we go through are painful and not what we would choose, but the end result is worth all the pain as we are able to comfort those who go through times of sorrow and doubt. We too need to be firmly tied to our stake of the Lord Himself to keep us firm and solid in His things or else we will wobble around not really sure of what we believe, and end up with broken off branches as the storms come through as they will.

So the next time you are tempted to ask “Why?” when things go wrong, just think of the young rose plants that need to be tied up and trimmed off , and remember to look up to the One Who loves us beyond compare!

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The Trials of Life.

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Trusting in God….“It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man”.

    As I read those words in my morning Bible reading recently, my mind went back many years ago to the time when we HAD put confidence in what people had told us and were badly let down. We were contemplating buying a commercial building with two tenants leasing it. The tenant downstairs seemed reliable enough, but the we had some doubts about the ones upstairs. We asked them how long they were likely to need the lease for, and they said as long as they didn’t expand, there was no likelihood of them moving. So with that assurance, we bought the building.

   For a few months, everything went well, and then the tenants upstairs gave notice that they were moving but would continue paying their rent until the end of their lease in six month’s time. This was a blow that we had hoped we wouldn’t have to face. Once the lease ran out, we were left with only half the income we had reckoned on, and as time went by we were unable to lease out the top floor. It was either too big, or there wasn’t enough parking. It was certainly never classed as being too small by any prospective tenant!

    Things were not easy and we began to wonder if we had made a mistake in “putting our confidence in man “. We had prayed about the proposition before buying it and done our homework as thoroughly as we could, but now the only conclusion we could come to was that we must have made a mistake in buying the place.

   During this time, my morning Bible reading was about the time when the Lord told His disciples to row across the lake, all the time knowing what was going to happen. He knew the storm was going to come and toss them about. Yet He still told them to go. They hadn’t made a mistake in setting off across the lake….they went at His bidding. He didn’t divert the storm, He allowed things to work out their course.  He knew He would meet them in their hour of desperate need and calm the storm.

    After reading this story, my mind settled down somewhat. We hadn’t made a mistake after all, the Lord just wanted to teach us that He was in control and would release us from the situation in His good time. It didn’t happen overnight but the building eventually sold and we were released from the situation we were in. How relieved we were and overjoyed at not having to go through this hard time any more!!

    I now know that whatever comes our way, God is always in control. If things are easy, we must give Him thanks, and when things come tough, we are to tighten our belts (figuratively) and still give Him thanks that things are no worse than they are! Above all, we are not to put our confidence in what people tell us, but to always trust in God and what He says. �����