God is like earth: turning garbage into flowers

Many of us seem to think that God somehow pushes us to make mistakes in order to direct our lives on the path He wants us to go. We use God as an excuse for our weakness and bad choices; the thinking is ‘if I’m in this position today, God knows why He’s brought me here’. It is a very comfortable theology: things happen as they are ‘meant’ to happen, and I have no responsibility for my mistakes, because God is the One Who brought me where I am today.

It’s as if God were as a coward tyrant, Who wants to lead our life, but doesn’t have the courage to do it openly, so He slyly trick us into doing His will. That definitely is not God, and that is not His doing. This is an idol we all are tempted to create to justify ourselves, because of our infinite ability to make up excuses and to avoid looking into the depth of our own weakness.

On the other hand, God does have the ability and the love to turn our weakness and our mistakes into sources for good things. I remember an elder saying that God is like earth, like dust, because no matter what you thrown and bury into earth, it somehow has the ablity to turn it back into something beautiful or useful. Out of rubbish or dirt or corpses, the earth has the ability to give us back beautiful flowers and good fruit.

So does God, only that the garbage is our sinfulness: your mistake may become your cross, and that cross may be your entrance into the Kingdom. That is why there is no reason to ever lose hope; no matter how spiritually rotten we get, God will find a way to return our own selves back to us as beautiful flowers and good fruit. We simply have to accept our true state, and allow Christ to do His work in us.