Making The Most of Shade

 My eyes glance over to the bookshelves that line the walls of the family room in my house. For some reason, they randomly fall on a title hidden among the reads pertaining to nature, flowers, and gardening. It's been on the shelf for as long as I can remember, and it's simply titled Making The Most of Shade. This house has always had a certain kind of charm because of its nestled place in the woods. Surrounded by trees and with a roaring river as its backyard soundtrack, it's pretty idyllic. And practical, too. Because when the stormy weather hits, the woods often act as a buffer to the wind as well as offer welcome respite from the beating sun in summer's heat. Anchored on a huge swath of bedrock, it's almost unshakable when it comes to earthquakes that are a common occurrence here. All in all, this location is pretty perfect... expect for one thing.    

The downside of calling these tranquil woods home is that it's not really your friend when it comes to growing things like a garden or many varieties of flowers. There's just so much shade from all the trees. So when you want to plant something, you have to be very strategic about finding the perfect spot on the property that has a decent mixture of sun and shade so that things will grow nicely and be happy. Thus, the need to buy this book years ago about how to maximize the benefits of growing in the shade. Yet, I suddenly realize that while I've looked at this book on the shelf for years, it never occurred to me that this place I call home and our pursuit of trying to grow things in its shady space is a metaphor for my actual real life! Until now, I didn't see that pretty much my entire story has been a quest for trying to redeem the shadows. 

All through my external and internal life, it's seems as though the shade has followed me. Whether it was my battle as a kid with seizures caused by my premature birth, my struggle years later with depression, other health challenges I've had to overcome, or my continued healing from post traumatic stress and anxiety, trying to grow in the shaded parts seems to have been my assignment. And it's been hard. Many times, I've wished for a sunnier spot and asked God why the cool shadows had to be my location. A more temperate and ideal place might appear to be desirable over this. But somehow, time and again, I've returned to the truth that the Master Gardener knows best. He knows me, He knows my story, He knows exactly why He called me to live and move and speak from a hidden, quiet place. 

For some unknown and mysterious reason, He has allotted me a body, mind, and spirit that operates from the less obvious spaces where things happen slowly, deliberately. Where healing is a process and growing takes time and the full-sun would somehow ruin what He wishes to do in and through me. He has given me just enough light for me to hope, to bloom, to rise. But He has deemed it best to let me do my assignment in the places others would dismiss or find undesirable. For it has been here - in this otherwise hidden space - that I have seen the fingers of God do their finest things. The Gardener has caused even the shadows to produce their own kind of beauty... something most are too busy trying to avoid and thus miss out on the quiet miracle. 

So just maybe "making the most of shade" is its own kind of special calling. It's true that I might not have initially wanted or chosen this path. Yet the fact that a good God has placed me here on purpose is enough reason for me to trust. To settle into this plot and determine that I will find a way to prosper here and maximize what I've been given. To see the shade as my friend instead of wishing for a life I wasn't meant to live. Here too, grace has been found. Because of the shadows, I know something special of the Light. In the most unlikely of places, hope has appeared: something I might have never discovered had the contrast of the darkness been absent. Perhaps this precise place has been the perfect one after all.