The Partnership

The few peach trees here on the farm have done their thing now.  We have been partnering together now with hopes of some peaches to eat.  I did the pruning, fertilizing, and spraying and they responded with the fruit.  Of course, God was the one who did the watering.  He also provided the sunshine, wind, and pollinators.  There are no solo acts around here.  Everything done is  in partnership with the God who creates and sustains, the dirt which has the power to produce, and the trees which draw from the earth.

We often forget the partnership part of life.  And, the truth is that we are not equal partners with God, but junior partners at the very best.   Too often we live as if life truly is all about us.  We take credit for our successes, the good things that fill our lives, and even the future which is actually completely out of our control.  The only thing for which we do not take credit are the failures and the shortcomings.  They are seen as the fault of someone else.  While there is a part of us which wants to deny this tendency of ours to pat ourselves on the back too quickly, our creative design is for us to be partners with God in this life.

Where we end up going wrong is in thinking that God partners with us to do what we want to do.  Actually, the partnership enables us to live in a bigger and more significant world than the one created by the demands of a never really satisfied ego.  The bigger world is spoken of in the Sacred Word as the Kingdom.  When we choose to partner with God, we begin to understand that our life is best lived when what He wants to do with us is the driving force of our life.  As we live in this holy partnership, we find that we are always moving toward the reason for being here in the first place.