Tending the Garden | At Home With the Gadbois Family

?Tend to your own garden. Let others tend to theirs. Yours may have flowers, theirs may have cabbage; Both are beautiful.? ? Voltaire from ?Candide?

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What Voltaire was trying to say was that we should mind our own business. ?If we are too busy trying to run our neighbours? lives, we neglect our own. ?And when our neighbours poke their noses into our lives, it hurts? ?It can make us angry. ? And it can distract from the important work in our own gardens. ?Much better to live and let live, each tending our own gardens, side by side, appreciating the beauty of each.

Blackberry blossoms at our door.

We recently spent several days nursing the upset of some rather unexpected criticism about our lives and the way we operate. ?It came out of nowhere, following on the heels of what we thought was a friendly exchange. ?And then we realized that we were expending far too much mental and emotional energy trying to figure out what we did wrong, how we could change ourselves to better suit someone else? ?What we needed to do ?- and did ? was to realize that it was *their* problem, their burden. ?Whatever caused the out-lashing did not originate with us, but with something that came long before we did. ?And because of that, they deserve our prayers for whatever is eating at them.

The last of the bleeding hearts in our shade garden.

And we need to turn our attention back to what we?re doing, continuing on our own path, exactly as we were. ?We have been given the wonderful life to live, and many gifts. ?And a plan ? a plan laid out for us by God, and revealed piece by piece. ?It is OUR story and no one else?s. ?In the end we will account for our lives to Him who gave them.

The chives we thought we lost during renovations, in bloom. God is good.

?Child,? said the Voice, ?I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any?story?but his?own.? Aslan ? ?The Horse and His Boy?

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