How does your garden grow?

While I'm well over a week into this two-week hiatus from work, I've yet to make one of my infamous vacation lists. Not that I've been sitting around eating bon-bons (although that's a lovely thought); my focus has been a bit different this break. Over the course of the last eleven days, in spite of the holidays, I've managed to spend significant time catching up with friends.

Coincidentally, I'm reading a little book called A Garden of Friends by Penny Pierce Rose (Regal Books, 2005). In it, she compares different types of friends to different flowers, each exhibiting different characteristics and each needing specialized care and feeding. For each flower, she includes a biblical example.

Roses, lilies, violets, daisies, pansies - even desert flowers and wildflowers bloom in my friendship garden. Some are annuals, some perennials, but all are needed to keep the garden fresh and interesting. And all need nourishing, or the bloom dies.

Have you fed a friendship lately? Encouraged a blossom with a deep drink of encouragement from God's word? Brought the sunshine of laughter to a plant stunted by too much time in the dark? Helped pull the weeds of sinful habits?

Take some time this week to work in your own friendship garden.

A friend is one who knows you as you are, understands where you've been, accepts who you've become and still gently invites you to grow.

-Anonymous