In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis compares our God-given human capacity to love to a garden. “[Such] a garden,” he says, “will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. [Although] it needs constant weeding and pruning … it teems with life. It glows with color and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined.”
Because we were created in the image of God, we have a natural capacity to love one another. Because we live in a fallen world, we have to work at loving the many kinds of personalities living within our sphere.
Love takes discipline, practice, and work. But if we will exert our directed energy, we will enjoy blessings we could never have imagined.
Take a moment to look at your “garden” today. How is it coming along?
