July 2

Read James 1

^"19-21Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God's righteousness doesn't grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life." (The Message)

I have to say up front that I'm not a gardener. I work in the yard because it needs care not because I get great satisfaction out of creating a landscape that others will admire. Now I truly enjoy a beautiful garden and would love my yard to be one of those places that has beautiful flowers and well groomed shrubs with maybe a water feature gently running through it bringing calm to the soul. But what I really want is a yard that is free from poison ivy! It seems every year that my wife gets into the poison ivy and it makes her miserable. We have had to change plans more than once because she was covered with the poison ivy. I hate what the little weed does to my wife and wish it would be gone.

There are things in each of our lives that are similar to poison ivy. They are the stuff that we allow to hang around that gets on other people and hurts them. Things like: unresolved anger issues; pride that steps on other people because you are more important than they are; greed that makes you do things because you think you deserve to have more; gossip you want others to see how important you are because of what you know; and the list goes on.

James says that we need to get rid of those things within us that poison peoples lives. Not just other peoples lives but our own as well. We seem to know that we need to change and some of us even want to change but the reality is that we can't do it on our own. We have to have God's help in the midst of it and that is truly what will change us.

Some thoughts to ponder and talk about with others:

• What kind of a garden or landscape do you enjoy? What is it that you enjoy about it?
• If your life, both words and actions, were a garden what would it look like?
• What might God do in your life to "clean up" the garden that you are?
• What one thing can you begin doing today that will help you grow closer to God so that you might become the person God has created you to be?