Lessons from the Prairie...Part 1

This is Dordt's Prairie. I spend a great amount of my free time walking through here. I mean, how could I not?? Just look at it! I think it's quite possibly my favorite place in Sioux Center. Plus, I know that all these flowers and the nice warm weather will not last much longer, so I'm trying to take advantage of it as much as possible while I can.

While going on these many walks, I've thought of few analogies... If you've read other posts of mine, you'd know that I've been mentioning the garden-heart analogy quite a bit. :)

When I walk through the prairie and look around, the one word that comes to mind is JOY. Everywhere I look, there's bright yellow flowers. They're nothing fancy or spectacular individually, but when they're all combined together, they're so beautiful to me. And I think that yellow is the perfect color choice for them. They just wouldn't be the same if there were a bunch of pink, blue, white, or purple flowers. Yellow is perfect. (But I could be biased because it's my favorite color.)

So one of my prayers while I'm looking around, taking it all in, is that when God walks through the garden of my heart, that He finds great joy in what He sees. I want Him to come into His garden, look around everywhere, and be so full of delight. I ask Him to do whatever He needs to my heart in order for it to be the most enjoyable for Him.

Does anyone have a guess what Dordt does to sections of their prairie each year in order to encourage the "natural" cycle? They burn it. I'm not going go get into all the science behind it, but I do know that if they didn't burn it, the prairie would not look like it does right now. It needs to be burned in order to be more beautiful.

And isn't that so true of our hearts, too? God burns our hearts with His fire! If He didn't, our hearts wouldn't be as beautiful. So the question is--What do we want more--a beautiful heart or a more comfortable life without any painful burning? We all know what we're supposed to say, but what really is your deepest desire?

You can start by telling Jesus that you want your deepest desire to be for Him to delight in your heart. You can tell Him that you want to be willing to let Him do whatever it takes to make your heart the most beautiful for Him. You can ask Him to burn up everything in your heart that is not pleasing to Him--no matter how painful it is to you or how much it costs you. You can tell Him that you want to better recognize how extremely worth it He is!

I can tell you that He will be so delighted in your willing heart of submission and will gladly step in to work on your garden more! :)