Hearing God Under The Azaleas

Well, today was a very fruitful day! I cleaned out and trenched around all my flowerbeds, prepared my daylillies and roses for the spring, cut my grass and put out 20 bails of long needle pinestraw! Needless to say, the yard looks great! One of the things I wanted to do today was to take out all the old pinestraw and replace it with new... freshen things up, etc...

There I am, literally under an azalea raking old straw out from under there and the Lord tells me to use the old pinestraw to encircle my trees and crape myrtle. So I begin to take all this old, nasty pinestrawy mess with leaves, straw, sticks, etc and put it around these trees. He started showing me how using the old nasty straw would serve as a reservoir of water for the trees during the hot summer weather. And it looks pretty cool too :)

It became so clear to me this morning under the azaleas in my front yard... in our life, there's plenty of junk we've all gone through - stuff we'd rather forget about and yet the stuff that has to some extent defined our life. The Lord showed me that there is a season in each of our lives when He will give us the grace to go under the 'pretty blooms' of our life and allow Him to clean us up from the hidden stuff. He so desires to redeem what once was nasty and use it as a reservoir of life for someone else. I'm continually amazed how the brokenness in my own life is used by God to provide strength and encouragement to others who are struggling with the same circumstances.

I pray tonight that the Lord would give you the grace to let Him clean up the junk and let Him redeem it and restore you for His Kingdom purposes in this generation!