Escaping to See and Hear God's Heart

Daughter stopping for a picture while heading to the church for granddaughter’s baptism

This week we stepped away from the social media connections and from the garden, jumping off the island onto a ferry, heading to California for our granddaughter’s baptism Sunday January 31.

In one of the books I carried along to read,  Gardens, A Literary Companion,(my exception from escaping the garden), was an essay by Douglas Chambers, “On Reading a Garden”, mentioning “the cybergabble that eats up most of our lives: voicemail, email (now the likes of twitter and facebook), all of it in the chain-mail of an electronic culture that prevents us from really seeing and hearing,” The escape to the garden was his solution; ours joining our family for this important celebration.

We have escaped it all (including a timely posted blog) to "really see and hear" this celebration. Tears welled up in my eyes when our kids rededicated their lives, our granddaughter smiled and gazed into the eyes of the pastor who baptized her, and the congregation promised to pray for her, guide and nurture her in word and deed. Our hearts drank in the importance of the day as we experienced God’s heart. I hope it stays with us all.

“Train up a child in the way she should go, and when she is old she will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6


What today will you let go of so you might really see and hear and feel God’s heart?





1.Douglas Chambers, “On Reading a Garden” from Stonyground: The Making of a Canadian Garden, 1996, excerpted in Gardens, a Literary Companion, Merilyn Simonds, ed. Vancouver, B.C.(Greystone Books, 2008, p. 43-44