Gardening, and John chapter 4

We've rather neglected our little back garden this year, what with ill-health and heavy rain. In the front it's mostly lawn, and quite dry, so it's easy to keep on top of; whereas the back garden, sloping quite steeply up to the old chalk bank behind, is damp and fertile, and breeds ivy and bindweed and nettles and all manner of rampant things in the most alarming way.

Now we're taking it back.

Jan, as usual, started it, with great plans which, although they can't come to fruition till the autumn, when we can start seriously moving shrubs without too much risk of damage, need at least the resolution of doing something right away. So we've been extending the top patio, and we've moved the water feature off the patio onto its own slab by the drop down to the lower level, beside the steps, where it looks cool and inviting, the water bubbling up over the (imitation) stone sphere and trickling sweetly down into the (imitation) stone basin. It's starting to look nice again, little by little.

Sorry for such an obvious parallel, but that just is how our spiritual lives get sometimes - neglected, and overgrown with rank, nasty things. The way out, though, is not to despair, to call oneself derisive names, to give up on the whole idea of spiritual formation and return to some more nominal kind of Christianity. The only way out is gently, gradually, not trying to clear the whole mess in an afternoon, but being content with one day at a time.

In one of my favourite chapters, John 4, Jesus doesn't try to change the whole of the Samaritan woman's tangled love-life in the course of a single conversation. In fact, he doesn't overtly try and change her life at all: he merely describes it. And, unlike so many of our churches today, Jesus doesn't demand evidence of "fruit in her life" before he'll allow her to preach the Gospel to her own people. That's right: a woman, a foreigner, and a loose-living one at that, preaching the Gospel just as she was, still stained with the life she'd been leading, not even baptised, preaching the Gospel.

We will get things wrong, we will let our lives get overgrown from time to time, but we must just do what we can, what there is right in front of us to do; and not go beating ourselves up over what we have done and what we have failed to do. Surely we at least owe ourselves the grace Jesus showed to this amazing woman, whose faith so far outstripped her righteousness?