My mother has a green thumb. Daddy says anything she can fool with, she can make grow. Typically, anytime I have a plant that is dying, I take it to Mama and she performs CPR (or whatever it is she does) and when it’s healthy I pick it up and try again. I wasn’t born with a green thumb, but I am learning.
We enjoy gardening at my house. The vegetable garden is always a hit (because, y’all, who doesn’t like to eat?!) but I also grow herbs for cooking and medicinal uses, and I have a “flower” garden. I put the word “flower” in quotes because they aren’t all blooming plants. Some of them are just beautiful greenery, like my ferns. But regardless of their proclivity to bloom, they are all grown for their beauty.
Since my foray into the wonderful world of gardening, I have learned a lot. I have learned different techniques to grow and divide different types of plants. I have learned different ways to tend to them, and treat the soil so that they will grow bigger, stronger and healthier. I have also learned a fair amount about compost.
If you aren’t from the country, you may not know about compost, so let me fill you in. A compost pile is a place where you take your yard trash (small, broken, dead limbs and sticks, leaves, grass clippings, rotted veggies from your garden) and your kitchen scraps (potato peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, vegetable scraps) and maybe some poo for good measure (the straw and poo from cleaning out your chicken coop, for example) and throw it all together and mix it up. Then you let it sit. You walk away from it. It has to sit for a long time. Not like a week, y’all. A loooooooong time. It has to sit for several seasons. Long enough to start breaking down. Long enough to rot and start going back to the basic nutrients of its composition. It smells bad, it’s full of bugs and worms and it just looks gross. But to a gardener, good compost is worth its weight in GOLD. 
When the compost is ready, the gardener works it into the soil around the plants. The plants are then able to access the nutrients in the compost and use them to grow, bloom, and produce fruit. It’s the ultimate in recycling!
So why am I talking about compost and chicken poo?
As you look back on your life (or maybe even right now) did you have seasons full of trash, scraps, broken and dead things? Sometimes, were there seasons where – let’s just be real, y’all – it just felt like you were standing waist-deep in poo? We all have those times. We all have difficult seasons that are painful, hard, dirty, and smelly. I could give you a list of the nastiest ones from my life. (I’m sure you could write a list of your own with no problems.) And even though the truth is that most of the time I brought it on myself, there have been times when I felt like I was eyeball deep, drowning in rotting trash, and it was all I could do to pull my head up high enough to say, “Help me, Lord! I’m not going to make it!”
The good news is that God is faithful, even when we are faithless. Even when we are disobedient and rebellious. Even when we are angry and hateful. He takes all our STUFF, and He lets it sit. If we are truly on the path to sanctification, then we are doing our best to please the Lord and not put ourselves in those places again. So as those seasons sit to the side, we break them down. We think about what led to that particular mess. Or what mistake took me to that pile of trash. Why did I end up knee-deep in dead and broken things during that season? And more importantly, we LEARN from those things. If we are smart, we acquire a measure of wisdom and discernment from those difficult times. Granted, sometimes, depending on the situation, for that to happen we have to be far, far away from it — that season has to have had a loooooooong time to sit.
But the BENEFIT comes in the end! God obviously didn’t ordain your disobedience or rebelliousness (or even somebody else’s disobedience or rebelliousness) that got you into that big mess, but He will USE it. Sometimes it has to sit a while, but after a few seasons, He 
works it into our soil and uses it to feed us and supply us with what we need to help us to grow and flourish into unique and beautiful things. All that rotted, smelly, worm-infested mess is used by the Master Gardener to help us to produce big, beautiful fruit.
Isn’t it exciting to know that no matter how gross, dirty, and smelly your past is – no matter how full of worms and poo it was — He has a future full of beautiful fruit waiting for you? So let Him have it. What are you going to do with it anyway? Holding onto it just leaves you bitter and smelling like poo. All you have to do is give him the mess, walk off from it, and allow Him to use it. You will be amazed how He can use your mess to impact lives for His kingdom.
Genesis 50:20 ESV As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.
Romans 5:3-5 ESV Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Proverbs 4:27 ESV Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.
Please feel free to share our posts and our blog site, and leave comments below! We are so glad you are here!