Earlier this week, some of the Ministry Team spent part of  the day at the Quiet Garden of Janet & Michael Chapman at Goosebury Hall.  As always it was good to get away for a few hours and simply let the peace and quiet of the garden take over.  For a gardener it is also good to see other people's gardens and pick up a few tips and ideas for one's own.

Gardening can be quite a labour intensive occupation/hobby. There is always something to do, some improvement to be made and it's very easy to get so totally absorbed with doing things in the garden that you never really get time to enjoy it. 

So something I read in the Royal Horticultural Magazine, The Garden, struck a chord.  Elspeth Thompson, who writes about for the Sunday Telegraph wrote of her experiences of just going into the garden and simply looking at it.  She suggested that this summer we should give ourselves time in the garden in which we do nothing but look.  So often, she says, I get so obsessed by clearing this patch of nettles or sowing this tray of seeds that I lose the larger picture completely: miss the way the light moves around the beds and borders, the dancing of a cloud of butterflies ...  and so on.  I know exactly what she means.  We really do need to give ourselves time to let the garden speak to us and show us its treasures. 

As I sat in the Quiet Garden in Goosebury Hall it was not difficult to translate that though to other aspects of life.  We are always so busy, rushing here and there, doing this or that and never having time to pause.  It's like that with our life of faith too, particularly if we are very active in Church life.  It can, as I know only too well, become all consuming.  We really can lose sight of the bigger picture.

And just what might that picture be?   Well, if you read the Gospel you will find that Jesus led a very busy, very active life.  He achieved in three short years thing we could only aspire to in a lifetime.  So much of his time was taken up by people.  Those disciples got a lot of his time as he tried to shape the Gospel of the Kingdom in their hearts.  Then there were the needy - so many of them, teeming from the Gospel pages - crowds clamouring for spiritual teaching; individuals wanting a healing or a freeing from sin.  We are reading St Mark's Gospel on Sundays this year and one of Mark's favourite words is 'immediately'.  Usually it is a link word between something Jesus is doing and the next thing he goes on to do.  It's a breathless word.

So Jesus needed to keep his eye on the bigger picture.  To do this he had what I call 'Prayer Pauses' - quiet moments (and often just that - moments!) when he turned his heart back to His Father.  That way Jesus kept himself focussed not only on the immediate but also on the eternal, on the bigger picture.

In our busy lives an dour hectic faith lives, we need to stop - to pause and think about God and let him come to us in a moment of quiet.  We need garden moments in our faith too.  Moments when we look at God and He looks at us.