Don't Miss the Garden

Life is a journey, and the road often takes us past places we would never have chosen. This is a picture God gave me many years ago. The path of life has a garbage dump on one side and a beautiful garden on the other. Both are real. Neither disappears simply because we choose to look in the other direction.

There is beauty along the way—but there is also pain. Disappointment. Loss. Fear. Wounds we didn’t ask for and circumstances we cannot change. Sometimes the mess is very real, and it sits right beside the path we are walking. But so does the beauty.

The question is: Where will I focus my attention?

For many of us, our eyes are naturally drawn toward what is wrong. The garbage dump is messy, noisy, and stinks.

It draws our attention. Before long, the garbage dump becomes our entire landscape.

But it isn’t.

There are still flowers blooming. There is still sunlight breaking through the trees. There are still people who love us, moments of laughter, unexpected kindness, beauty in creation, and ordinary gifts we hardly notice.

And most importantly, God is still with us.

Focusing on what is beautiful does not mean pretending the painful things aren’t there. It means refusing to allow them to become the only thing we see. Look at the picture again. The garbage dump is not the largest part of the picture. It might be louder and smellier, but it is smaller. The same is true in life. There is always more beauty than pain. But we have to stop and smell the roses, or we will miss them. We need to turn our attention to the beauty.

This is one of the gifts of appreciation. Appreciation helps us turn our attention toward what is good and life-giving. It helps us notice the small packets of joy God has scattered throughout our days. Over time, we begin to discover that even in difficult seasons, there is more beauty around us than we realized.

Perhaps abundant life isn't a life without a garbage dump.

Perhaps it is learning to walk the path with Jesus, acknowledging what is painful without making our home there.

We can notice the mess. We can grieve what needs to be grieved. And then we can turn our faces toward the garden.

The pain may be part of our journey, but it does not have to become our home.