The Garden

The last church I served was the Rocky Ford United Methodist Church.  I went there after retirment to fill in for a pastor in the hospital and ended up staying four and a half years.  It is a very small congregation church in a very small town about ten miles from the farm.  I rode up that way this afternoon and found myself meandering through the Prayer Garden which sits beside the church.  Started  back in 2000 by some of the older women, it is now nurtured by the Creator and the childen of some of those mothers.  It is a wonderful place filled with a quiet peace that penetrates the soul of anyone who lingers more than a minute midst its beauty.  

There are some words etched in a granite stone at the entrance which says it all, "Peace to all who enter here.  God's grace to those who depart."  As I walked about while waiting on a friend to arrive, I was struck by the order of the place which was all around me.  Those who created and cared for the Garden created a place of order out of what was chaos.  Even as the Creator God took the chaos which existed before creation and brought into being a garden called Eden and filled it with order, so have those who have tended this holy garden there beside the church. 

When my friend arrived he walked around with me and from his memory spoke of the different blooming plants and how they arrived there in the place they grew.  Some bore a common name and some were known as the rose bush in memory of Mrs. Anne.  The church does not have a playground, or a modern looking new building, or even a lot of parking spaces, but it has a garden where surely the Spirit of God walks in the evening breeze and the people who enter and leave do so with a sense of quiet peace and a heart filled with unexplainable grace.