Leave Space for Grace

When you leave space for grace amazing things can happen. ✨🌱🌺

Every year when the first morning glory flowers bloom I’m reminded of this story.

I bought my condo a few years ago and it has a nice partially covered patio area. The living room, dining room, and bedroom all have big windows and sliding glass doors that look out at the patio.

But the view wasn’t exactly inspiring to me. It was all stucco and concrete, gray and lifeless. I like to look out my windows and see life. Green plants, beautiful flowers, and, my personal favorite, vines growing on things and hanging down. The hanging vines remind me of my time in Costa Rica; that wonderful land where the life force is so concentrated and powerful that living things seem to spring forth in wild abundance from every square inch of land.

So one of my first projects was to build a planter to fit in a corner of the patio opposite my living room windows and we added some trellises for the vines to grow on. I planted some vines but they all died on me. So I went back and got a different kind of vine and some ground cover and tried again. Most of it still died 😂 but one of the vine plants survived and is still thriving today.

However, one of the trellises remained empty and nothing seemed to grow on that side of the planter. Nothing that I planted anyway.

I had been reading about St. Francis of Assisi and the gardens he instructed his friars to build always saved room for flowers. I was inspired by that and very much wanted to plant flowers in my garden, but I was afraid they would just die like everything else, and I was rather short on funds at the time. I didn’t have the money to buy them anyway.

So I prayed. But I didn’t just ask God to send me flowers or money to buy them or something like that. That’s not how I pray. No, I worked on solidifying the desire in my heart and I repeated Francis’s words:

“Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
Who sustains us and governs us
And who produces varied fruits
And brightly colored flowers and herbs.”

You see, I wasn’t coming from a place of lack and hoping to manipulate God into interrupting the natural order to intervene on my behalf and satisfy my desire. I was praising God and thanking God as if my wish had already been granted.

Then, one day I noticed a little tiny sprout over on that side of the planter where nothing seemed to want to grow. I wasn’t sure what it was. I certainly hadn’t planted it. So I kept my eye on it. I made sure it had some space and kept it watered. And a little vine grew.

It grabbed onto the empty trellis and flourished. Soon there were beautiful flowers in abundance right outside my windows where only a year earlier there had been nothing but stucco. That one seed grew into a mighty plant that produced hundreds of seeds.

Now each year in Spring more and more morning glory seeds sprout and my garden is overflowing with beautiful flowers in more abundance than I ever could have imagined. All because I left a little space for grace.

We often try so hard to plan and control everything and then we are dismayed and disappointed when things don’t go the way we want them to, and even if they do we limit ourselves to what we can envision when God has a vision for us that is so much grander than anything we could ever dream of.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan or act. I built the planter. I filled it with soil. I watered it. I created the necessary conditions and environment for the seed to grow. I prayed for flowers. I remained vigilant and noticed when the seed sprouted. I watered it and protected it. But God provided the seed. One that would flourish where everything I had planted died.

So plan and take action, pray and be vigilant, but don’t be so busy and full of yourself that you fail to leave some space for the grace of God in your life.

That is where true abundance will come from.

Love,
Justin
❤️🙏☀️