You know the quote about some people being seasonal? How they are in your life for a season and then their friendship or purpose that God wanted them to serve blooms and they move on like a seed in the wind. Over the past year I have really learned what kind of flower garden I have and which ones I want to plant more of in the future. What I want to spend my time cultivating and what I want to enjoy while they are here, but when they go, learn not to be heartbroken, because this blooming season is over and they did not come with the little plastic card labeling them as a perennial.
Amazingly, when word gets out that you are in the hospital, people you haven't spoken to in YEARS come out of the woodwork wanting to know what happened and how they can help. When they hear the story, they slowly go back to doing whatever it was that they were doing when the Newsflash of something interesting happening on Aisle 1 came across their screen. I'm just as guilty of doing this in the past. I'm trying hard not to do this anymore. It's part of the new boundaries that we are setting in our home also. We used to be really transparent and open with everything pretty much. But we are learning to guard ourselves more and more. Not everybody is on a need to know basis.
Proverbs 4:23 tells us to "above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." I read recently how this verse can be easily equated to physical hearts as well as spiritual hearts and the correlation between the different physical heart ailments and the different spiritual heart ailments. I've made it a goal of mine that as we are getting healthier at our house, we are not going to have any hardening of arteries, physically or spiritually, good bye high cholesterol and regret and anger and denial. Even though I may have a physical heart murmur, we are going to make every effort to not have any spiritual heart murmurs. I can't help the fact that the valves that act as doors to my physical heart sometimes let blood flow backwards into the heart. I CAN help the fact that my spiritual heart complains, takes part in gossip, disputes and arguments. No more. It is not healthy. It is not what my purpose is. If you, dear flower, come to me with these types of things, please understand that the door may be shut and not opened. It's a new boundary. As we are working on our high blood pressure in our home to keep physical congestive heart failure out so we won't have a weakness in the walls of our hearts, I'm getting rid of the spiritual equivalents of it...being quick to anger.
Now the question becomes, what kind of flowers do you have growing in your heart's flower garden and are you an annual or a perennial?
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