While I’ve been distracted harvesting some of the fruit – raspberries
and strawberries, currants, cherries, brambles, and now apples – couch grass
and nettles have crept in among the roses, entwined themselves among the sweet
peas and marigolds. I never noticed, and then suddenly, yesterday, it was all I
could see as I passed them on the way to water the greenhouse tomatoes.
Choking the flowers I nurtured, these unwanted weeds were
ferocious in their resistance to my trowel and fork. A rogue cherry tree had
taken hold, its roots resting on the roots of a rosebush also gone rogue,
bearing rose hips this year. I had just enough time before the rain fell, to
dig and cut and wrestle the roots out as best I could, leaving a small expanse
of bare soil.
It won’t be long before that bare soil is filled with
another scattering of weeds.
When Jesus expelled the demon from the man, he encouraged
the delivered individual to be filled with the Spirit of God now, lest an even
more vicious cohort of demons should invade the vacuum of his soul. A vacuum is
never stable, always open to accept whatever will stabilise it.
Go on being filled with the Spirit, Paul encourages. Coming
to God, being cleansed of sin and restored through the blood of Jesus, is a
daily routine for a serious believer, and offers the delight of being filled
again with the Holy Spirit so that God’s beauty and love and presence can be
fully experienced in the daily routines of life. May I be filled again with the
Spirit today, strengthened and enabled to walk in the peace of Jesus and extend
kindness and hope to everyone I meet.
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