What's in your Garden?

Your heart is a garden. This garden should be a peaceful, protected place where you choose what to cultivate and grow, as well as what to keep out or pull up. You're the only one who comes here, others only know what you show them from it.

What's growing in your garden? Gratefulness and Contentment? Or Roots of bitterness and Seeds of discontent?

The goal is becoming whole: bringing together who we are on the inside and what we do on the outside. The task involves moving targets in both places. Who I am on the outside is either a reaction or a response to what's going on around me. Our circumstances are constantly changing!

What's going on inside is also in flux. Winds of change blow through the garden of our hearts in the form of thoughts and moods. Our interior climate may be icy or warm depending on caffeine, blood sugar, and how much sleep we've gotten. Good news, bad news and social media interaction also affect us.

But here in the garden of your heart there is also stability. Character traits are rooted in the soil of habits and discipline. This is the place you choose from! Decisions about the influence you have will flow from this place. Whatever you have growing in your garden was planted, watered, and allowed to grow. Perhaps you haven't been very aware or intentional, but there they are: weeds or flowers, trees, shrubs, grass. There are also hedges or fences to block the wind and keep things out.

In this picture there is a bridge. I like to think of that as your connection to the outside world. You built that bridge and you decide what crosses it. Perhaps you have allowed an Ugly Troll who lives under the bridge to keep out the positive influences. Or maybe you push a little cart full of weeds and thorns over that bridge to export to the world.

At the end of the day, what happens in this little "Secret Garden" is entirely up to you.

Here are some ways to control what goes in and out across that bridge:

- Choose your friends wisely

- Choose your words carefully (quick to listen, slow to speak)

- Smiles are the flowers you share from your garden

- Words of encouragement are good soil to grow in: you need them and so do your friends & family

- Cultivating Gratitude: Giving Thanks is a good way to root out discontentment

- Make your garden a place you enjoy being, protect the Peace in your inner space

- Bring peace to your environment, change the atmosphere

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." - Proverbs 4:23