Category: Abundant Gifts from a loving God

I had a rather complicated surgery on May 1, 2023, which would be right around the time I usually planted my little container “stoop garden”: petunias, geraniums, coleus, begonias, impatiens, a hanging vinca plant, all surrounding the little chair on my front stoop.

 

I loved to sit there in the mornings, writing my “morning pages,” taking in the beauty of the sunshine, clouds, and flowers.

This year, after the surgery, I was in no shape to plant the garden. No one else could, either, for various reasons.

On top of that, there was a severe drought here in the Midwest until late July or so, and a lot of my neighbors’ gardens weren’t looking like much, either.

I sorely missed my flowers. Something about their colorful, happy, oh-so-different shapes and leaves just makes me happy.

My friend Louise and I were able to visit the one day the Ball Seed Company opened its local gardens to the public. I enjoyed the flowers and plants, but there was also a stab of grief again that I didn’t have my garden this year.

God knew, and God did something wonderful and totally unexpected.

It’s not only the garden that was neglected this year. Our whole landscape has been sadly neglected. Neither my husband nor I was able to keep up with it. I needed to hire a landscaping service, but we weren’t even up to that. Too many other pressing things demanded our immediate and ongoing attention.

So under an ailing pine tree near our driveway, there is a tangle of ground cover. I had a few pots amid the tangle from last year, in which I would put colorful annuals, usually petunias. But not this year.

One morning as I returned from my morning walk, I noticed a spot of white amid the tangled greenery. Closer inspection revealed that one of those pots had petunias growing in it! White and pink, perfectly placed in the pot so there would be room to grow.

I was amazed. Apparently the petunias from last year had reseeded and grown, all on their own. I’ve never had petunias reseed and grow on their own.

As I looked even closer, I saw that there were another couple of small petunia plants also in the pot. The next day, one of them yielded a red petunia.

I put the petunia pot next to my chair on the stoop. Now I had one hanging plant on my right (the one my son got me for Mother’s Day), and one pot on my left.

 

 

 

 

 

But that’s not all!

The icing on the cake came when I spied a tiny coleus plant coming up next to the concrete stoop. I had weeded there just the week before, but hadn’t seen anything then. Now this tiny, perfect coleus had somehow popped up, nowhere near where I had planted coleus before.

I carefully dug it up and put it in my flower pot.

I also added a couple of other plants I had kept and rooted over the winter: begonias. I thought they would not make it in the new pot, but now they are thriving and about to bloom. I’m curious what colors will show forth.

But wait—there’s still more!!

Just this week, about a month after I’d first spotted my new “garden,” I spied yet another plant growing up next to the stoop. I might have missed it, but for the one tiny flower that bloomed.

This time it’s an impatiens, same color as last year. 

For the time being, I’m leaving it there. I want to see what happens when I let it “bloom where God planted it.”

This is the “garden” God gave me this year. This is about all I can handle tending.

It is enough. It is a delight. I receive it as a gift from a God who knows me all too well, and tenderly gives me just what I can handle.

I’m thrilled not only with my surprise garden that God planted, not me. But also with how it’s grown in just one month.

The whole experience makes me feel known, loved, tended to, cared for, joyful and hopeful.

An “abundant gift” from the God who knows me, indeed.

Would you like to be able to notice and receive more of the gifts God has for you?

Download my free Abundant Gifts Journal and start looking for, and jotting down, the things that feel like “gifts” (such as what you just read), every day. You will be amazed at how much you notice and the healing and shifts that will happen effortlessly in you, when you begin to focus on the gifts I’m convinced God is always strewing on our path . . . if only we will stop to look for them. For inspiration, read the Abundant Gifts blog or my book, Abundant Gifts.

 

 

Spring is such a wonderful time, isn’t it?

This spring, somehow the phrase “the leaping greenly spirits of trees” from the E. E. Cummings’ poem, “i thank You God for most this amazing” has come to mind every time I take my daily walk.

So, in celebration of spring, and a poet who “got it,” I post this poem, and below, a video recording of the poet himself reading it.

 

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

“i thank You God for most this amazing” by E.E. Cummings, from 100 Selected Poems. © Grove Press, 1994.

I love this time between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when everything slows down and there’s time for reflection.

I’ve seen some excellent suggestions for reviewing the past year/decade and welcoming the new, such as this “Simple Guide to Reviewing 2019 and Creating Your Dream 2020.”

But as I was thinking through my own answers, I realized that one of the things I want to focus on this next year is simplifying my life.

One of the ways I feel led to do that is to seek God in everything, big or little. I want to align myself with His plan, His purposes. I can discern that in my own spirit, as informed by prayer and His Word, as well as my past experiences with God. I can also ask my body, through the subtle energy testing I’ve learned to do.  The spirit and the body tap into an intelligence that goes beyond consciousness, I believe.

So, this year I’ll not only be asking myself questions like “what am I most proud of?” but also, “God, what are you most pleased with from what I did this year?”

Not only, “What have I learned?” but “what lessons do you think were most important, Lord, for me to carry into the new year?”

Not only, “What do I want to create?” but “What do you, Jesus, want to create and do through me?”

These questions excite me. I plan to spend New Year’s Eve and/or Day reflecting in my journal on these, and talking to my husband about them.

I think I already have hints of what God intends for me.

Once in Immanuel Prayer, I got the image of Jesus and me sitting on a potter’s bench. He was behind me, his arms around me, his hands on mine guiding my hands on the lump of clay. I know nothing about making pottery, which is just where Jesus wanted me: totally dependent on his guiding me. At the time, I had no idea what we were making. I was to just yield to the process, to his guiding me. Yield to the intimacy of his closeness, arms around me, hands on mine.

A few days later, he did reveal what we were making: “A vase for flowers (beauty). Two mugs–one for just being present and enjoying a hot drink, one for holding your pencils and pens, because you are a writer. And a bowl for fruit–I intend you to be fruitful. Finally, a pitcher for water–to offer a cool drink to those who are thirsty.”

I look forward to finding out in the coming year all the ways these symbols will be manifested.

Yesterday, I wrote about how God restored my joy through giving our family Perfect Dog, Chester.

Chester had a trauma on the day I published that, and I thought you’d like a little update.

Our Perfect Dog was bitten by a Rottweiler. He is on the mend now, after getting two staples put into the wound in his back. I am spritzing Halo water on it, as well as the warm Espom Salt compresses (when he’ll let me).

Interestingly, though he was very touchy and in obvious pain, once I did a custom Healing Code for him he was much better. We even went for a walk and he was fine. I was concerned that the collar was so near his wound, but he seemed fine on our walk.

I think the trauma of being bitten and then going to the vet is also what needs to be healed, besides the physical wound itself. When I approach him with the warm compress, he shies away, as if remembering the vet or some other trauma. When I actually put the compress on, he’s OK. I think The Healing Code is addressing the main problem–whatever trauma he harbors.

I’m trusting God to heal Chester quickly. Taking care of him, and watching my son tenderly care for him, is yet another joy through a painful experience.

The gifts keep coming … if we are open to them. What God is showing me again and again is this: Painful things happen in this world where the kingdom is already here, yet not yet fully realized.

The sure hope is that God can bring good out of any evil.

A few weeks ago, in one weekend, two terrible blows came upon me.

The first one had to do with my business, and I was very distressed about it. It was about the worst thing that could happen to a business like mine. It happened on a Friday night, it was a tech issue, and I knew I wouldn’t get any answers until Monday morning.

I said to God sometime Saturday, after I’d done all I could do to salvage the situation, “Lord, I’m giving this to you. But I have lost my joy and my peace over the past three years, and I don’t know how to get them back.”

God knew how.

That weekend, God brought Joy back in the form of a dog.

To understand this, you need to know that while I love dogs, and still missed my Bishon, Millie, I had decided not to get a dog “unless God dropped Perfect Dog into our lap.”

That weekend–enter Chester the Cairn terrier.

My adult son, David, was staying in a cabin with his buddies that weekend, and this dog was hanging around the whole weekend, outside in the rain, apparently abandoned.

David called me Saturday morning. “Mom, would you consider having a dog?” (Since he lives with us at the moment, he needed our permission to bring the dog home.)

“Absolutely not!” I quickly said. “I don’t need any more complications in my life. Especially now.”

On Sunday, David called on his way home and said, “Mom, I couldn’t leave him. I’ll find another home for him if he doesn’t work out.”

Fair enough. I told David, “OK, if he isn’t Perfect Dog, you can find a home for him.”

Well, Chester is Perfect Dog.

It’s like God hand-picked him. He is very well-trained. Playful. Doesn’t bark indoors. (That one’s for my husband, who jumps out of his skin at unexpected loud noises–like dogs barking.) Chester loves to walk. (That’s for me. He even loves walking in the rain–like me.)

Chester is one bundle of joy, and he sparks joy in me. (Did you know we have a Joy Center in our brain that literally lights up when someone is “happy to see us, happy to be with us”?)

God knew just how to put Joy back into our lives.

And He knew how much we needed it, because the very next day, our family experienced a very traumatic loss. As I told David, “This dog is God’s constant reminder that just as terrible things can just happen out of the blue, so can good things, like Chester being dropped into our laps out of nowhere.”

God used Chester to restore my joy. In a few days, He would also restore my peace in an unusual way. But that’s another story….

 

I was thanking God for showing me a new heart issue that needed to be healed, when these words landed in my heart:

I reveal it so we can heal it.

Dr. Mark Virkler says we hear God’s voice as “spontaneous thoughts that alight upon our minds.” That’s a pretty good definition, but I would amend it a little. Because when I hear from God, it’s more like “spontaneous messages that get impressed upon my heart.” There is a knowingness, a feeling about it, that is deeper than emotion.

So it was with this.

I noticed something about the words: It wasn’t “I reveal it so I can heal it” or “I reveal it so you can heal it.”

It was, “I reveal so we can heal it.”

Healing is a partnership.

My part is to be open to the revealing. Sometimes it’s downright painful to have something revealed. This issue certainly was. It went very deep.

But I have found in my Healing Code work that when something is revealed, it is ready to be healed. Things may take years to show up, as this issue did—because I had to heal a lot of other things before I was ready to heal this.

So my part is to be open to the revealing, and then to do the Healing Codes and to pray.

God’s part is to actually do the healing.

I have to show up for it, ready. Only then can he do his work. That’s how God chooses to work in our lives—through this partnership.

Because what he’s always after is a relationship with us. A relationship where we can hear his voice, know it’s him, marvel that he deigns to speak to our hearts and to heal.

“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).