Hey Church!
One of the ways I spent my time off last week was by prettying-up our backyard with some new plantings. Now, I have never considered my thumb to be any shade of green whatsoever but I do appreciate the beauty and creativity of a well-kept landscape. With a little extra time on my hands, I decided on Tuesday to drive down to the nursery on Flamingo Road to see if there was anything I might want to add to the yard. I was hoping to come home with a navel orange tree (I grew up with one in my yard and loved having fresh-squeezed O.J.) but what I ended up bringing home was, for reasons that were not yet clear to me at the time, a couple of planter boxes and a handful of bell pepper plants.
I had no way of knowing at the time that God would use my rather felicitous shopping spree to preach a very timely message of hope to my heavy soul.
Having never planted any kind of food-producing plant before, I spent a good bit of time on YouTube learning from the armchair experts of cyberspace how to NOT KILL my new little green friends. I followed their instructions on choosing good soil, ensuring proper sunlight and drainage, knowing when to water and fertilize, how much spacing was needed between plants, and so on. So you can imagine my dismay when the only flower that had begun to bloom on the first day was, just two days later, facing downward all brown and shriveled. Throughout the week other flowers appeared but quickly decayed like the first.
Back to YouTube I went–this time to find a video of what others’ bell pepper plants looked like. Was this normal? Or had my newfound hobby met an untimely end?
That’s when I came across the following video. When you watch, notice the time stamp in the bottom-right corner. I have estimated that my plants were about 50 days old when I brought them home from the nursery. You will see it flower, decay, and then… God preaches.
The message was loud and clear: “Ryan, death is nothing more than the first stage of my resurrection work in you.”
I mentioned that my soul has been heavy. And it’s something different than depression. It is more external, like a cloud of spiritual darkness that I think we all feel has descended upon our time in history. Like an offshore storm, our socio-political climate has been gathering up the energy and momentum necessary to bring total spiritual destruction and death to our doorsteps. It’s an unspeakable evil that seems to have already injected its numbing agent into peoples’ minds and spirits such that they are, and will continue to be, unable to see it for what it is until it has devoured them. And the most despicable part of it is that our children are being raised to call it all GOOD.
Church, I have said it before and I’ll say it again: if God does not send revival our country will be swallowed up by this present darkness and the liberty to preach the gospel with it… But if and when that happens, take courage. It cannot last. It will only be the first step of resurrection.
All of this is summed up beautifully in the following song. Take it in over the weekend. Let it replace anxieties with the hope we have in our Maker. He is making all things new.
Your brother,
Ryan