It’s so exciting to start the garden in springtime. The thought of fresh veggies at the end of the season makes the initial planting fun and easy. And as you see your time and effort sprout before your very eyes, knowing you planted all the tiny seeds, it’s a truly thrilling time of year.

It’s all fun and games until you have to clean-up the garden for the winter.

As you all know I’ve been in that blissful haven of traveling. I’ve ignored responsibilities at home. Fall cleanup has been shoved to the backburner. Laundry has been piled sky high. And this summer’s garden has not been cleared out yet. It looks like a rotting brown muck of weeds out there. I keep meaning to cross it off my list. I’ve just been preoccupied with other, less undesirable tasks. But it does really need to be done. And this gnawing feeling that I must do it before the ground freezes won’t let up. And so today, I begrudgingly put on my garden shoes, grabbed a pair of gloves, and picked up the rake. 

As I trudge toward that big mess, totally dreading the task before me, I promise myself that I will only do an hour. One hour, manageable right? So I put in my earphones, picked a podcast, and set to work. Pote, my miniature schnauzer, pitched in too, to help with some digging and weed pulling. At first, I was a bit cranky. This was not how I wanted to spend a rare sunny afternoon in Wyoming autumn, but soon I zoned in on the work and into the podcast and before I knew it the section that I had wanted to finish was complete. And it hadn’t even taken me the whole hour. Thoroughly impressed with myself, I set out to do a bit more so I wouldn’t be so far behind the next time. I even organized and put away all of the garden tools. Sufficiently satisfied with my progress I head inside for a tik tok break and some dinner.  

I’m sure you can think back on an unpleasant task that turned into a productive venture. There have been many times where I’ve procrastinated on something that I know needs to be done because I think it’s going to be this huge production to get it finished. But in reality, if I had just started it when it needed to be done it would have been finished in a timely manner and without so much hassle.

This reminds me of the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us in John 16 that when he departs, he will send the Holy Spirit to us. “And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness…” John 16:8 ESV. 

We call ourselves Christians because we aim to be Christ-like and to follow the teachings of Jesus. As a Chrisitan, we read our Bibles, we know what the Lord expects of us- to love God with all our heart, our soul, our strength, and our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes we need a little help. Sometimes the Holy Spirit convicts us of what needs to be cleaned up in our lives so that we can follow the teaching of Christ better and better each day.

It’s not always easy, actually most of the time it’s like cleaning out the garden. We know we have to do it at some point, but we make excuses and procrastinate because we think it’ll be too hard. I would say the majority of Christians feel like this at some point or another. 

When I started taking my Kingdom journey more seriously, the Holy Spirit had a lot to say about the way I was living my life. Together we’ve worked on numerous things I thought would be just awful to change. Looking back though, once I got into it, it wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be.

Let me give you an example.

I love binging shows on Netflix. And I like all kinds of genres. Action, adventure, humor, romance, you name it, I’d watch it. It didn’t happen suddenly, but overtime, I found that I just couldn’t stomach some of the shows I was watching anymore. Some shows would have so much cussing. Others would have very explicit sex scenes. And others would push woke ideologies into their stories. I would get so fed up with the stories being taken over by all this unnecessary raunchiness that I would just turn them off. I eventually caught on that the Holy Spirit was prompting me to cut out these very worldly shows. I tried to sweep it under the rug at first. “It’s just a tv show,” I would try to justify myself. “I’ll just skip over all the bad parts”. But my heart started to ache with disgust. One day I turned off a show because of a bad scene and from there on out it became easier and easier to just not watch those kinds of shows. I thought it would be hard to give up binging on Netflix, it’s what I did when I wanted to wind down from a tough day or relax on a day off. But it really hasn’t been hard at all. Now I really try to be prudent about what I watch. And I find that the programs that I am watching are so much better than the ones I had put on before as a way to zone out. 

You see it’s not always as hard as we think it will be when the Holy Spirit asks us to adjust something in our lives. And it’s always easier when we ask God for help. I am not a perfect Christian, nor will I or anyone else be, but we can strive to listen and act swiftly when the Holy Spirit asks us to. Just like cleaning the garden, once we actually begin the task, it’s not as bad as we think it’ll be. 

Is there an adjustment the Holy Spirit has asked or is asking you to make? I’d love to hear how you responded. Or if you need prayer, drop me a comment, I’m always willing to pray.

 “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” Matthew 16:26