Happy New Year from Garden in Delight! And here’s hoping you have enjoyed the Happy Old Year with the blog as well, finding fun, insightful, creative ways to grow faith alongside your garden, and to plant places among the posies that lead thoughts back to remembering the One who dazzles us with His delight.
After all, the Lord knows we need reminders! Consider his instruction to the Israelites, when crossing the Jordan River, to enter at long last the land He had promised their ancestors:
Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you…“In the future when your descendants ask their parents, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them, ‘Israel crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the Jordan before you until you had crossed over. The Lord your God did to the Jordan what he had done to the Red Sea when he dried it up before us until we had crossed over. He did this so that all the peoples of the earth might know that the hand of the Lord is powerful and so that you might always fear the Lord your God.”
Joshua 4:5-6, 21-24 NIV
The Lord displayed his power on behalf of his people, parting the river’s waters to cross on dry land. To impress them? or to impress upon them…a bit dramatic, perhaps? However, through all the difficult, drastic situations to come, they could clearly remember God’s ability and possibility in parting waters, and His ever-presence with them.
And that’s why we Garden-in-Delighters putter around our gardens with trowel in one hand, Bible in the other, to plant and remember the same: His ability, possibility, and ever-presence, and to put His Word into the practice of our daily lives.
As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.
Luke 6:46-47 NIV
A Happy Old Year of Garden Blogs
To recap our exploring and discoveries of God’s Word in the garden, and to catch up on blogs we were too busy to savor at the time, I’ve made a short list of topics published in the Happy Old Year:
(click titles to link to articles)
Garden Devotions – Little by Little, Garden Goofs & Bible Humor, Praising God in Leeks, Onions, & Garlic, Simple Thanks in 5 Solas, Winter Garden of Light
Garden Design Ideas – Acanthus Everywhere, Bitter Herbs Blitz, Surprising Cypress, Elegant Elaeagnus, Promise of a Pollinator Garden, Vegetables with Love
Garden to Table Recipes – 40 Cloves of Garlic Chicken, Spiced Date Chutney
Garden Visits – A Tasteful Place at Dallas Arboretum, a Bible Gardener in Buffalo, NY, Rooftop Garden at the Museum of the Bible
A Lenten Look at Trees – Fig, Olive, Oak, Tamarisk, Almond, Palm, Bay Laurel
Book Reviews – Hamilton, The Revolution
New Plants in the Plant Guide – Acanthus, Caper, Cypress, Willow
A-to-Z Primer of Plants from God’s Word – F is for Fig, G is for Garlic, N is for Nigella, O is for Olive, U is for Umbels, Y is for mYrtle
New in 2018
The Garden in Delight blog pauses over the month of January to clean up home before returning to garden, yikes! I look forward to our new year reunion on Thursdays beginning February 1st. More plants, new garden design ideas, and a Lenten series on Flowers of the Field await us!
In the meantime, follow my Instagram account @shelleycramm for glimpses of #Godswordforgardeners
Happy New Year!!
Photo Credits:
©2017 Shelley S. Cramm
Old garden urn from my mother-in-law’s garden in southern California, we bade a tender, sweet goodbye to her home & garden this year
