I had a conversation the other night with a good friend who’s brother I also knew, passed away recently. We talked a lot about giving things up, can God really be trusted, girls, girls being amazing, girls being the most complicated things on the planet, girls being amazing, and than we talked a about poo. No connection to girls at all
  We talked about all the crap that can happen during one lifetime. How God doesn’t “do mean things” to us but he uses what Satan would have meant for harm, and He turns it into something amazing. The next morning thinking about it all again I was struck with the thought of manure. Mostly great big trucks full of it. Some people pay to have them come dump it on their lawn or field and others would call the police if you did the same thing. But manure IS one of the best fertilizers you can get. Soil that has been cared for and “seasoned” with crap will always grow better crops or flowers than soil that is left to get hard and compacted over time, soil with no refreshing or fertilizing will often “run low” on nutrients and provide very small returns.
  So when the truck pulls up and drops a ton of manure on our lives we are left with two choices, we can just let it sit their, smell and rot, or we can let the gardener mix it in. We can let his fingers go deep into our wounds and let the brokenness saturate us, let the reality of our inability to do anything on our own soak deep within our souls. Let humility be fused to who we are, and our need for him become more real than our need for food. Because apart from him all this really is is a truck load of crap, but because of him, it’s holy fertilizer
  We often keep the gate to our garden locked because it feels like so much work to keep it tended. So it sits. The ground becomes hard, weeds start to take over and what used to be a fruitful garden slowly produces less and less. It happens slowly so we often don’t really notice, we just look back at our lives and think “Man, the apples used to be so much bigger! And the tomatoes just aren’t that juicy any more.” We think we must be getting old, “Our taste buds don’t work the same as they used to. Our hearing is bad so we don’t hear as many of the birds that used to live in our garden.” “Times have changed, the city is no place to have a garden anymore.” “There is no joy left in working in the garden, it’s just so much work now compared to the amount of fruit it produces. It’s just easier to go to the store and buy fruit.” And so the garden gets worse and worse.
  But then the gardener who owns the garden and lets us tend it shows up. He comes to check and sees that it needs some serious work, or maybe the guy who owns the store hates the gardener and all his gardens. He knows that the fruit from the gardens is way better than anything he sells. He also knows the gardener gives it away for free, and if you own a store where people have to pay… free is never good for business. The store owner sees that we don’t go out their much anymore, and he would prefer we stopped going all together. So he orders the smelliest, grossest thing he can find, a whole truck full of crap and dumps it in the garden. He does this because he knows it works. Most might go out for a day or two and try to shovel it out of the garden, already disheartened by the state of the garden but now even more repulsed by it’s smell. Angry because this whole seasons fruit now covered in manure is unsafe to eat. Who would do such a thing!? But after a few days, sweating and toiling caring one shovel at a time to the edge of the garden and hucking it off onto what ever is next door, we give up. It’s just to much for one person to move, there is no point, it’s so much easier to go to the store, especially when it’s so cheap. So they close up the garden and live with the smell. Knowing the fruit they buy never tastes quite as good and never seems to last as long. But when your hungry and the store is right their… who wants to go shovel manure in the heat? We eventually become desensitized to the smell and just get used to store food. And we never know who ordered the manure because we never even attempted to inquire… we just know it smells.
  In all reality it doesn’t matter who ordered it or why, as long as it just sits there it will always be just a huge pile of crap. If you toss it somewhere else, it’s just a huge pile of crap somewhere else. But the minute you mix it into the soil… it changes, and now it’s fertilizer. So when the crap shows up, regardless of who ordered it what matters is what we do with it. And when we call the gardener and tell him what showed up, he calmly responds with. “Ahh, well if you’ll just get the gate for me I’ll be right over and we’ll get this sorted.”
  So we let him in. He begins to shovel and spread the fertilizer around, it seems to be no work for him at all. He tells us where to spread it and where not to, but it appears he moves three or four shovels to our one. He seems to be loving this. He smiles at us and laughs, not at our disgust or situation but out of sheer Joy! He has been walking by our garden every day and watching it slowly get worse, seeing the fruit get smaller and the ground getting harder. He has been waiting, chomping at the bit for us to invite him in and let him work. He seems to almost love shoveling manure but it’s more that he loves spending the time with us. Anyone who has worked an un-enjoyable job for many hours but with an enjoyable friend would tell you there is something about it that brings the two closer together. As we grow tired the Gardner just encourages us to rest and let him work, and the less we do, it almost seems he gets all the more done. He begins to do many other things that we have neglected, sometimes even uprooting plants we planted. He thins the garden and tells us how less is often more. He breaks up the soil telling us the danger that hard dry soil poses to our plants. But most of all he turns up the soil, careful of all the plants that he is keeping, and mixes in the manure. As he does the smell becomes less and less of manure and more and more of rich black soil. Our hands are dirty together. The air seems fresher, the contrast of green leaves on the rich black moist soil is one we have not seen in years. The weeds are gone. But in all the work that has taken place one half of the garden now seems to be gone, just black soil is left, it’s there that while he worked he also planted new seeds. At the moments we were complaining of the smell he was planting superior plants. Ones with better fruit yields, heartier ones that last longer and some that are there just because they are beautiful.
  It is also at this moment we realize there is no way for us to possibly keep the garden looking like it does right now! It almost seems bigger now that it is cleaned up, when the new plants come up there will definitely be far more than there were before… and we were incapable of tending to those! But before the weight of all this new work can set in, he just says with a smile “Don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow and everyday after to help you out.” And in time the birds are back, we were not loosing our hearing there were just no birds anymore. The fruit is Amazing! Even better than we had remembered. There is so much fruit we have enough for our entire neighborhood. The garden is bigger and better than it had ever been, despite the store owner, the old smell, or any painful moments there might have been. But the best part truly is that the Gardner comes back, day after day, after day, after day.
  So let the “Crap” in your life be fertilizer, regardless of whether it was dropped there to harm you or delivered by the Gardner himself to nourish you. Either way offer it up to God and invite him in to do his work. He can be trusted. It is through our brokenness and willingness to submit to him that he is able to turn piles of crap into the most beautiful amazing fruit you will have ever tasted or experienced.