1) AGONY IN THE GARDEN

When have you experience an agony in the garden?

It’s important to have places where we can hide: gardens, backyards, parks, churches, cellars, backrooms, bathrooms, inner rooms.

It’s important to have places where we can cry.

It’s a blessing to have our own garden – a place where we can grow green things – and red things – zucchini and tomatoes – tulips and roses – a place where we can cut and snip, weed and plant – a place where we can get away from it all – a place where what we are doing outwardly, is happening inwardly – cutting and snipping, weeding and planting – in the secret garden of our soul.

Rev. Robert Tristen Coffin was once asked if he enjoyed being a minister. He thought for a moment and then said something like, “I love it. Being a minister is an amazing life – especially when someone invites you into the secret garden of their soul and they tell you who they really are.”

And if we could enter into the secret garden of another, wouldn’t we see both a garden of delights as well as a garden of sorrows?

For many, the agonies in life stand out like broken branches on the grass after a storm. Family stories might sound like a novel, but they are not novel. Every family has rejections, crushing comments, broken vows, people who walked away from us, failures, alcoholism and drug addiction, loss of a job, or kids who don’t seem to care.

Jesus often felt the need to escape. He loved to slip away in the night to enter into the dark garden of God – and discover that God is a never ending garden of Delight.

On the night before he died, Jesus walked into a garden to pray. He needed space. He needed strength. He needed friends. So he asked his closest friends – the ones he climbed the mount of the transfiguration with – to stay awake and pray with him. And he prayed and cried and they slept.

And all alone, feeling rejected by both God and friends, he cried out, “Father, if it is possible take this cup of suffering away from me, but not my will, but your will be done.”

We too, whenever we feel like we’re stuck, need to escape to a garden – and when life feels like we’re in a garden of agony, if we look around, Jesus is there too – and he’s not sleeping.