Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
I think that's my strength, that I am an amateur gardener who loves gardening. I've read about it, I've written about it, I've done it all my life but at heart, I'm just a passionate amateur gardener.
No one warns young people to follow Adam's example. He waited till God saw his need. Then God made Adam sleep, prepared for his mate, and brought her to him.
Gardening is an excellent example of a practice to which, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, certain virtues are 'internal'. Good gardening requires a certain goodness on the part of the gardener: care, humility, patience, and respect, for example.
No one warns young people to follow Adam's example. He waited till God saw his need. Then God made Adam sleep, prepared for his mate, and brought her to him. We need more of this 'being asleep' in the will of God.
Without Prayer nothing good is done. God's works are done with our hands joined, and on our knees. Even when we run, we must remain spiritually kneeling before Him.
Saw him where?" "While I was sitting outside with one of my half aunts." This seemed to satisfy Ronan was well, because he asked, "What's the other half of her?" "God, Ronan," Adam said. "Enough.
I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.
The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.
How rich a God our God is! He gives enough, but we don't notice it. He gave the whole world to Adam, but this was nothing in Adam's eyes; he was concerned about one tree and had to ask why God had forbidden him to eat it.
He was not subordinate to God - Adam was walking as a god! What he said "went," what he did "counted"; and when he bowed his knee to Satan and put Satan up above him then there wasn't anything God could do about it because a "god" had placed Satan there. Adam, remember, was created in the god-class, but when he committed high treason he fell below the god-class.
In my mind God made Adam and Eve, he didn't make Adam and Steve.
You can always tell when a man is a great ways from God--he is always talking about himself, how good he is. But the moment he sees God by the eye of faith, he is down on his knees, and, like Job, he cries, "Behold I am vile.
Even though Eve ate the fruit first, God went looking for Adam. It had been Adam whom God had revealed himself to as LORD God in the context of giving Adam divine instruction.
I can not imagine a God ... made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great'.
People who are close to God cultivate a personal intimacy with Him like a good gardener cultivates beautiful flowers.