Growing With My Garden

Note: We are off to a fine start.  My heartfelt thanks to each of you who commented after the entry on Chapters 1 - 10.  I  personally found the comments very helpful and I’m sure all who read them have.  We hope to see more participation.  Please feel free to express whatever reactions–positive or negative–you may have, as you react honestly to the text.  MacDonald is concerned in this novel, as in many others, with carefully delineating the experience of various individuals and personality types as they become aware of their need for God, and who then by steps move into a happy and productive relationship with him.   Our reading in this week’s chapters concerns the initial process of awakening as it is taking place in Thomas Wingfold and in Helen.    After a restless night, Wingfold awakes “consciously uncomfortable,” with the terrible realization that “his very life was a lie.” He had been reading each Sunday morning a sermon composed and left to him by his old clergyman uncle

THOMAS WINGFOLD: CHAPTERS 1 - 10 This novel was published in 1876, about midway through George MacDonald’s novel writing career.  He thought it was his best to date, having achieved a way to express and explore in imaginative literature his deepest convictions as to how individuals come into a vital relationship with God and grow spiritually.  He also incorporates in the novel his responses to the main issues of the time: the historicity of the miracles, the authority of the biblical text, and the validity of Darwinian evolution. In Chapter One we are introduced to Helen Lingard.  She has just finished reading a novel and is annoyed by the way the author ends it; however, her annoyance opens a new and very necessary phase in her life: it prompts her to begin to think.  Thinking–we are told–is something that she has not yet begun to do.  “She was even on the borders of making the unpleasant discovery that the business of life . . . for every man and woman born into the blindness o

A good friend of mine asked the question which is on the minds of a great many:  Why does God allow such disasters as the Covid -19 virus to occur?  My answer ran like this: The answers to the issue  you raise, of course, are at the heart of true faith.  I think one has to hold tight to the very basic truths:  God is love, and all his actions are motivated by what is really best for people; i.e., complete surrender to Him, to achieve complete repentance and that free-willed union with God  which is His will (he is not willing that  any perish),  and  the ultimate good of all people, the essence of bliss.  Since mankind is fallen and rebellious--there is no good in them--human quests are all wrong. The world as it is--fallen and filled with adversities–is  the only proper home for such beings, and adversities, including stupendous disasters, are inevitable and proper.   God allows them in his love. Acting in love, with man's ultimate and only possible good in mind, God permi