How Long, Lord?

How long Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide Your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

And day after day have sorrow in my heart?

Psalms 13:1-2

I take comfort in the fact that many years ago, David wrote a Psalms so raw from his heart that it encapsulates the burden that some of us carry in our hearts today.

How long Lord?

I’m exasperated in asking Him. How long more do I have to painfully watch another’s garden blossom as I feel my rose petals slowly wither. It looks like a wasteland in my sight, dry, parched, barren. How long Lord? Do I have to sit and wait in anticipation for a flower to bloom and for my garden to be beautiful again? How long Lord? Do I have to watch as you build to tear apart again?

The last thing this feels like is beautiful. The garden’s cracks reveals the battles fought, the battles still being fought, the parched land reflects my mistakes, mirroring my thirsty heart that has used the world to quench its thirst.

But a still small voice whispers hope.

The wasteland that I see as waste is a beautiful work in progress garden moulded for eternity.

In the Father’s eyes, what I see is not what He sees. What I see as barren and ugly is beautiful in His eyes - the pruning, refining work of a heart made for eternity.

Ecc 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

And this is what I can have hope in. The Faithful Gardener who still sees the best in us when we see nothing in ourselves. Who moulds even the parts of ourselves we deem unmouldable. Who doesn’t see wastelands as wastelands, but turns wastelands into beautiful gardens.