Reason #852

Where has your beloved gone,
    most beautiful of women?
Which way did your beloved turn,
    that we may look for him with you?

My beloved has gone down to his garden...

 

- Song of Songs 6:1-2

 

She was looking for her beloved. Where was he? She needed him? She wanted to be in his presence again. And after a moment of thought, after her heart calmed down enough for her brain kicked back in, it was obvious where she would find him. He was in the garden.

 

The garden. It is where we find Him. It's the first place we should go in our time of need. The moment we are to our wits end, when our frustrations are too many to count, when our disappointments outweigh our joys and when we don't think we can take it anymore, we need to do what He did. We need to go to the garden.

 

"Then Jesus went with them to Gethsemane, and he said, “Sit here while I go over there to pray.”... he became anguished and distressed. He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying... - Matthew 26:36-39

 

I told Aaron how I felt. How it seemed like the more I was trying to give it up, the more the weight was bearing down. How I felt that it was me. That maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I have done something wrong. I told him I couldn't shake it. I couldn't get a handle on how I felt, but I was tired of it. I was tired of feeling burdened. And I was feeling alone, unheard. Almost as if I was being ignored. Yet I desperately longed to be close to the Lord, to feel his presence, and I was having a hard time with that for some reason. And so he listened, he hugged me, and then he prayed over me.

 

We find Jesus praying in the garden. We go there because we need Him. We fall on our knees and we cry out to Him. The garden is our safe place. Our refuge. We can tell Him anything. We can lift up our requests and find comfort in knowing He hears them. Who knows how He will answer them, but what really matters the most is that we are in His presence. The garden is where He walks and talks with us, where we meet Him, and the garden is where we find the strength to keep moving forward because we know we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.

 

It started in a garden. In perfect paradise, God met with His creation face to face. And even though they messed up, He redeemed them by Jesus' sweat drops of blood that fell as He prayed in the garden. Because of that we not only have access to the garden, we always find Him when we go there. In the garden we find God, we find redemption, we find grace, and we find that He has a much greater plan in store for us.

 

#852 - Because we find Him in the garden every time.

 

"Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made." - Genesis 2:8