Groundwork

Preparing the ground must come first.

When we are ready, and God leads us to where He most needs us to be, we can hope to put our hand to the plough.
But first we must prepare ourselves.
We will be unable to begin, unable even to find the ploughshare, let alone a source of power with which to make use of it, until we are awakened to the guidance of the Spirit of God within us.
The ground within ourselves must be worked, and for this there is no plough, no oxen, no harrow.
These will be formed from the person still buried deep beneath our worldly outer selves.
Before we can even begin, we have to dig deep into ourselves; uprooting thickets of thorn, tearing out tussocks of coarse grass, clearing away the rocks, the brambles and matted weeds to expose our fertile but hidden soil.
Only then can our inner ground itself be turned; and all this must be done with nothing but our bare hands.

We are as Adam.
“By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground as you were taken from it.” (Genesis 3:19)
We were all born in Eden, and through Adam’s fall away from God, we all shrank away from the awareness of His presence.
Paradise was lost; a forbidden awareness gained.
This is where our striving begins; with the climb back into the presence of God: leaving the hiding place into which Adam led us all.

If we have begun to reclaim our basic consciousness of where we were created to be, we can - ‘by the sweat of your face’ – transform our hearts and minds sufficiently for them to become receptive to the word of God.
And God has given us – all of us – regardless of how far we have strayed from Him, the means to find our way back: the means to follow that word.
He made His word a living form that we might use our earthly senses - in the exercise of which we are so well practiced – to hear, to see, to touch, and thus to learn, to turn, and to return to our place with Him.
Jesus was born into the world; God’s Word was made flesh.

Our gradual awakening: our building and dwelling on the nebulous awareness within until it begins to fan the deeply buried ember of faith, is the unravelling, the laying bare, and the making good which readies us for following Him.

“Clear the ground that lies neglected, do not sow among thorns.” (Jeremiah4:3)
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