The Garden Of Your Soul Series

*This series, Trauma and Transformation Level 2, includes short homilies/talks to a class at the Yonge Street Mission called Trauma and Transformation, Level 2. The messages are aimed at a mixed audience, some with no faith, some with Christian faith, some with other faiths. The mission serves all without prejudice and seeks to draw people closer to God in Christ as a key part of their healing process.*

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I want to commend each of you for being here today. That has already been said, your commitment to your ongoing healing, your willingness to be part of a community that is in the process of healing, is admirable.

And has already been said, you’re here because of the work you’ve done before today in Level one of Trauma & Transformation.

You will likely recall that for each of those classes, I would bring a message that would touch on spirituality as a key to continuing your forward momentum in personal growth.

We believe in a holistic approach to healing, and we believe, at the mission, that our internal world, that which is at the deepest part of us, which we can call our spirit, is truly worth tending to.

If we think of our internal life perhaps as a garden, we can imagine that the experience of a well-tended garden is quite different than the experience of simply walking through the wilds, or two unmaintained fields.

There is still, of course, a very natural beauty to nature, whether it is cultivated or not.

But if any of you are like me, and have spent any time trying to maintain a well-functioning proper garden that produces fruit and vegetables both for you and for the animals, the rabbits and such in your backyard, you know that there is an effect and impact to paying no attention to the garden.

And there is an effect and impact to tending the garden well.

What might be the effect of paying no attention to the garden? It tends to become overgrown, it can invite animal life that you might not want such as snakes and all kinds of bugs.

My wife and I moved into a house recently in Frankford, north of Trenton, and the backyard had not been mowed for 3 or 4 months.

It had become a breeding ground for ticks and of course we had concerns about West Nile virus as well.

An untended garden or backyard becomes super easy to trip over, and then eventually,

and I’m speaking from experience, it becomes a picture of chaos.

You either can’t get to the fruit and vegetables, or to do so becomes just a great deal of work, and the common outcome of that is that the garden is simply left ignored.

So it grows, but it grows without a watchful eye, a careful tending, thoughtful and intentional pruning aimed at increasing the fruitfulness and beauty of the garden.

So all that to say that our internal world, our internal being, our spirit is truly worth paying attention to, and that when we do that, since our spiritual life, it turns out,

is foundational to our existence, when we begin to order our spiritual life, many other things that we might work on have a foundation to rest upon, a truly solid foundation.

Not to overdo the metaphors, but if you know anything about construction, the foundational stone, the cornerstone, that’s laid determines the eventual outcome of the building.

When you get the foundational stone in the right location, and when it’s made of the right material, it makes possible everything else that might be constructed upon it.

So… I wanted to look very briefly at a passage of Scripture, from the Old Testament book of Psalms. The passage was written by King David.

You might remember that we talked about him before, and that he is a very colourful character in the old testament.

Despite his many flaws, and some pretty atrocious things he did in his life, he ended up being referred to by God in the scripture as “a man after God’s own heart“.

At the very least we can understand that this suggests that no matter what had happened to him, no matter what he had done,

all of those things were significantly less important than the fact that he eventually sorted himself out and had his internal world ordered correctly.

He had learned what the ultimate good was, the absolute highest ideal, and he spent his life pursuing that.

I may have mentioned to you that I was raised to be an atheist, and I was very much so until I hit a certain age in my teens.

I very much understand the difficulty some of us here may have with the concept of God.

At one point the very concept of God was offensive to me and, frankly, in my mind it represented the lowest possible way of thinking.