For Behold, I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you will be cultivated and sown.”
Ezekiel 36:9
To cultivate means to prepare.
Last weekend, I watched my neighbors built a garden bed on the side of their house. They broke the harden compacted soil with a sharp-edge hoe and turned the soil inside out. They picked out pieces of concretes, buried in the soil for over two decades. Those concrete debris were left by the builder when they built the house. The builder did not take the time to clean them because they knew the landscaping crew would add soils and grass on top of them. Keeping them hidden for years…
Until my neighbors decided to use the area for a vegetable garden. Unlike the grass that have shorter roots, vegetable requires fertile and clean soils.
Once the soil was loosened, they pulled the weeds. Then they got on their knees and picked up smaller rocks with their cultivators.
God is our gardener. He wants to make a beautiful garden in our heart. Sometimes the preparation requires our heart to be broken so He could help us resolve and throw away harden concrete debris. Debris from our past, perhaps way back from our childhood when the building process was just started. Debris that were deeply buried and sometime forgotten.
God know the depth of our heart… He knows that some debris needed to be dealt with and thrown away… So even though the digging hurts…
It is necessary cultivate the soil… so seeds can be sown…
