Buy cheap buy twice?

You may have heard the old saying - buy cheap, buy twice. This week I learned it the hard way. I ordered what seemed like a perfectly good garden office - a bargain, I thought. It arrived with roughly a third of the pieces missing and the rest in a condition that was, shall we say, optimistic. What looked like a great deal might yet turn out to be a rather expensive lesson, but this has got me thinking.

We live in an age of imitations. My sister has just started reading the latest self-help book. Go to any self help section of a book shop or library and there are literally thousands of them. Each of them promising clarity, purpose, peace of mind, and a better version of yourself by chapter ten. And I don't want to be unkind about them, some are genuinely helpful. But I do think that so much of what our culture reaches for are, at their best, partial answers to a question that goes much deeper.

The Bible might be considered the original self-help book. Except it doesn't really promise to help you help yourself. It promises something far more interesting - within its pages is someone to help you. That the peace people are searching for is found in a relationship with the one who made us and knows us better than we know ourselves.

Jesus said "Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." Not a five-step plan. Not a morning routine. Rest. The real thing, not the imitation.

Buy cheap, buy twice. Maybe. I think that some things are worth going to the source for.

Dry bones and dead grass

I've been thinking about my garden this week. A couple of weeks ago my lawn was a sorry sight. Weeks of sun had left it scorched and yellow - more dust than grass, perhaps yours was the same. Today, as I look out, it's starting to turn green again!

It reminded me of one of the strangest passages in the Bible - Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones. He sees a field of bones, bleached and lifeless, and God asking the somewhat baffling question: "Can these bones live?" And then, by God's power, breath by breath, life returns where there was none.

At our last Eden service I shared the ending of the feeding of the 5000 from the Jesus Storybook Bible. The author writes that this is "what God has been doing from the beginning. Taking the nothing and making it everything. Taking the emptiness and filling it up. Taking the darkness and making it light."

This is what God does. This is what he has always done. He brings life - even, it turns out, to neglected lawns. Whatever feels dry or beyond recovery in your life this week, I pray that you'll know his hope and his power. Don't give up on it quite yet.