PHOTO: It took three years of pruning, but the end result of this wisteria marvel was worth it.
May can be a taskmaster. The lawn seems to need cutting every other day instead of every other week. The flowers come and go and bushes beckon for a trimming and the pool needs opening and the …
In general, work can be viewed in two ways: 1)as a necessity where we hold our noses and just Nike-it-out, or 2), as something that draws us into a portal to heaven as in an divine calling. Even if it’s the latter - when we are the middle of it - it can still leave us questioning how and why we ever got ourselves into this noble work in the first place. Just think how God feels now while He waits until the timeline of man is completed.
But when God allows us to see the task completed, we know that the image of God implanted within us has just been unveiled and there is something of an eternally internal ribbon-cutting in which all of heaven is attending and applauding.
There’s a scene in Star Trek’s “The Wrath of Khan” where creation springs up
and Captain Kirk and the doctor whose work is manifested in the scene limply mimic what it must have been for God after the six days in Genesis. (Even so, it’s fun.)
It’s the kind of satisfaction that Moses had on Mt. Nebo when God allowed him to see the promised land; the fruit of Moses’ labor.
It’s the sense we get when we hear Jesus say, “It is finished.”
There will come a time when God wraps up history and/or our individual lives. We want Him to let out a long sigh and say, "This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased and who finished well."
With this in mind, we may never look at work in the same way.
PORTAL TO HEAVEN: Taskmasters are rarely seen as portals to heaven and yet something as aggressive as the month of May can usher in beauty when the gardener decides to obey her to-do list and gets to witness a job well done.
Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the LORD showed him the whole land…Then the LORD said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, 'I will give it to your descendants.' I have let you see it with your eyes”…When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Deuteronomy 34:1,4 NIV, John 19:30 NIV