Welcome to our December edition of House2Home. As we look back on 2013, the Executive Care team and I are very grateful for our faithful readers and the clients we have built relationships with via landscaping. Whether we have been able to inspire you with new ideas through our articles or have had the pleasure of creating a landscape for you, we are very appreciative of these relationships.
We are blessed to be able to do what we love for a living. Yet it is the building of relationships, and bringing joy into people’s lives that make us feel that we have earned more than just a paycheck. We have earned trust, and friendship. These are not just professional. It is also personal. Over the course of a project, I have the opportunity to really get to know my clients as people, understanding their personalities, their hopes and dreams, and even their challenges and worries. And this carries beyond the extent of the job.
Whether it is personal or family health, job concerns or relationship woes, we all face challenges and worries. I know I do! Yet by working so closely with nature, I see daily evidence that God has a plan. Consider the seasons. Each plays an important role in the life cycle of a plant, while also acting as a metaphor for the stages of our own lives. Or consider that each plant has been designed for a specific setting, including climate, soil type, and shade vs. sun. Like people, each is also beautiful in a wholly unique way. Consider, too, that plants, like people, are subject to challenges. Granted, their challenges—like insects and extreme weather—are not as emotional as the challenges we face. Still, the ways in which nature provides an ever-present picture of the Master Gardener gives me a quiet confidence.
That confidence is increased when I am designing a landscape because that creative act gives me a further glimpse into the wisdom and beauty of God’s plan. I am extremely pleased when I am able to overcome a design challenge in a practical, yet artistic way. I am also humbled, because the solution given to me, to what felt prior like an insurmountable challenge was already accounted for and solved in God’s mind.
While the challenges I face in design and in business are real, they are small in comparison to personal challenges and burdens. When I was but a boy, my younger brother drowned. The details of that story, however tragic, are less important than the fact that I blamed myself. It is a burden that I carried for years. Still, as I look back upon that incident, including the self-searching it caused, I realize that it has shaped the man I am today. From a young age, I was acquainted with the reality of death. And, like people young and old, I needed to make sense of it.
I have learned to see life as it is, through nature, with life and death being part of it. And in accepting death, life becomes more precious causing me to live in such a way that every moment counts. I can tell you that God has used both nature and other life experiences to convince me that He has a plan, and that He is absolutely in control of that plan. I am certain of this. And I rest in that certainty. No matter what life (or business) throws at me, I rest in God’s sovereignty.
Rather than turning to an impersonal dictionary definition, I would like to share what God’s sovereignty means to me. My definition of sovereignty is that God is over all of life and over every moment and event in my life, whether those moments/events are happy or sad, whether they bring me joy or pain. And sovereignty means I don’t have to understand it all. I have come to see God’s wisdom through the years, many years after a painful event. And as the hardship of nature makes the plants and trees strong, growing deeper roots, so I find the same truth in me, causing me to seek to know God in a very real and personal way. As if this were not enough, God’s sovereignty also means that He will work all things together for good, even the things that feel awful for a time, if I will but come to Him.
It is a great blessing for me when my work as a Landscape Designer and Contractor allows me to share the source of my confidence in a way that helps and encourages my clients who are facing challenges of their own. Likewise, it is a great blessing to be able to share my faith in God’s sovereignty with my readers through this annual article. If you would like to learn more about God’s sovereignty or the ways in which my faith has been cemented, I invite you to read “Sovereignty, Part II on our website
Until next year, may the Lord bless and keep you. And, as always, Good Gardening.
Thank you for taking the time to read our Christmas edition – Merry Christmas and God Bless.