Extremely Random Thots (from old blog site)

This was something I wrote on another site I have. Am transposing it here. It is from several months ago...November 30th, 2006

KJ

This is a little thing that I was meandering thru on the way home from work one day. I know that there are probably large gaps in the logic (or lack thereof) chain, simply due to my difficulties in transcribing my thots onto some sort of readable medium. Anyway, here it is:

On one of my recent hour long drives home from work, I was musing on human existence. (Great way to start a letter, eh?) No, really. Follow me as far as you dare. My mind is a weird place.

I was thinking, like thousands before me, on the surreal quality of human consciousness and its connection to God being I AM. I have read several different theologians who describe God’s I AM-ness as a quality of His own perfect self-existence. Right behind that, the Apostle John’s words from John 5:26 popped into mind: “For just as the Father has life in Himself, so He has given the Son life to have in Himself.” So, now I had as a quality of I AM as having life within Himself. Now, that we are given life from Him is clear in Genesis 2:7 and Acts 17:28. But, having a bit of His life, His I AM, started to percolate. The next thought that surfaced was that each person expresses a bit of their self in the following ways: their clothes, hairstyle, car, house, yard, etc. These all have a bit of creativity attached to them. This would make sense since God is Creator. And how does the Creator express Himself? In the world around us. And this world around us is absolutely teeming and exploding with life! Every blade of grass, every tree, every grub, insect, animal, and fat cat is alive. This world was designed to sustain life perhaps because its Creator is LIFE. Even after sin and death entered the world, God’s creation still sustains life with amazing deftness.

So, following the train of thought, what then is the parallel for us? Do we create life? No. It is not within us to create life, only the LifeGiver can do such. But, in the perfect world before, the world and man worked together, giving and taking in peace. (Awww…) On this side of Genesis 3, man only seems to be able to “kill” things in order to enhance his own life, not benefit other life. But, God did give us a job before and after the Fall: gardening. He put life into our hands to care for and tend. We cannot create life but we can take care of it.

Now, before you think I fell off the wagon, hang on a minute. Within the last two years, Aubrey and I have had to alter our diets dramatically due to medical considerations. This has lead us to unprocessed foods: organic eating. Now we read stuff that contains buzzwords such as: pro-biotic, sustainability, free-range, grass-fed, locally grown and even kosher. These were words and things I always associated with liberal environmentalists. I never thought I’d be rubbing elbows with them at farmer’s markets and health food stores! But, as we’ve participated more and more in this way of living, we’ve grown in appreciation for how organic farming seeks to emulate the natural way God had already set up: using compost to create humus, not using artificial fertilizers or insecticides, growing things during their season and enjoying them for that season. The mistake many of these people make is found in Romans 1:25: “They have exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, by worshipping and serving created things, rather than the Creator – praised be He forever, Amen.”

We also have an organic little vegetable garden (we’re not very good yet), an organic little flower garden, and an organic little herb garden. We are trying to tend to the expression of God’s I AM by bringing our own “I am” into concert by sustaining and tending to life in our own personal design. In this way, we have found beautiful communion with Him as we participate with Him in restoring a small bit of His earth to a place where we declare the Kingdom of Heaven to be alive and active in our backyard. It is such joy to garden with the Gardener and to observe and stand awestruck by the Creator of this marvelous creation: life.

So, the moral of this story is: grow something with God and see what He might show you.