The Garden On The Hill

I came across this quote while reading a book on prayer, "God cares about everything that concerns you, so feel free to talk to him about anything." Many of us look at little things and don't consider praying about them because they're little.  But you know, if they are something that we care about, God cares about them also.  He wants us to pray for the big things and the little things.

The Garden on the Hill

At a doctor's visit several years ago, we were talking about my garden and how I wished I had remembered to bring him some tomatoes. I told him how healthy the garden had been producing more food than I could hardly keep up with in the harvesting process. He asked me what I had done to it to make it so successful and my only answer could be we prayed a lot for the garden. He kind of turned up his nose and that was the end of that conversation.

Later that week a neighbor asked me the very same question "What did you do to your garden to cause it to be so healthy? I have never ever seen a garden to grow so quickly and be so healthy looking." And so I decided to tell her the whole story and this is what I said.....

Well, do you remember my daughter Sarah? She married a Baptist preacher. She said that she did. I told her that on planting day (in late May) I asked him to really be praying with us for this garden. He told me that he would and he kept his word. Many times when Sarah and Dan would come to visit Sarah would come on in the house and I would say ‘"Where is Dan?" and she would always reply "He’s up at the garden praying for it." And that garden grew and grew and grew. God answered our prayers and we received such a wonderful harvest ~ more than ever before.

My neighbor asked "But you used a good fertilizer on it right?" I told her how we had meant to put fertilizer on the garden ~ we hardly had any in the bag so we just lightly sprinkled what we had in one area ~ and planned to buy more and do the job right but we never did ~ and we had also meant to put stakes at each corner with tin pans tied to them so they would scare off wildlife ~ but we simply never got around to that either. She said, "Wait til Woody hears this." I said, "Oh there is more. There is this tree between the house and the garden and frankly I didn’t even know it was a peach tree. Low and behold peaches began to grow ~ lots of peaches ~ and when they were fully ripe they reminded me of a Christmas tree with these large red bulbs hanging on it. They were juicy and tasty and I froze many peaches."

My neighbor began to laugh and I said "The only thing I can say is praise God because He did all of this. He made the garden grow like it had never grown before." And it is true. He yielded this massive amount of produce - even when we didn’t take precautions to keep the pests out of the garden ~ even when the grass began to turn brown from lack of rain ~ that garden kept on growing with beautiful green foliage.

Isn’t it funny how we can even praise God through our garden. My neighbor had said that she didn’t know how many people she had told about this garden. And now she can go back and tell them "the rest of the story" and it will be a testimony of God’s greatness ~ of God’s providence ~ of the mightiness of our God and King. Dan took my request sincerely and walked the perimeter of that garden ~ approaching the throne of Christ ~ asking for a bountiful supply. And God honored that. It was such a testimony to me, truly, to the power of prayer.

Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with Thanksgiving

Colossians 4:2