I was conducting a Fit For Life Forever seminar and sharing about how thrilled I had been to discover my ‘new’ body which I had never known before.  Speaking metaphorically I said that I’d wished I’d known years ago what a gift God had stored up for me underneath all the ‘packaging’, at which point Dave, my husband, shouted out spontaneously, ‘Me too!’  He brought the house down with that!

I was reminded of this incident only yesterday when I was tidying up the garden. For twenty years we have lived in apartments so my fingers are ‘green’ in more than one sense of the word. I don’t recognise many of the shrubs in their dormant state and will have to wait a few months before I know just what is there. Adjacent to our property there is a huge sycamore tree – very beautiful, but the winter gales and prevailing winds have inconsiderately dumped all its dead leaves over our landscaped garden, reducing much of the surface to a mushy brown pulp. Yesterday I decided to brave the cold and collect them up.

What a surprise I had!  For underneath the dead foliage I found a multitude of green shoots (could be daffodils or crocuses – I can’t tell yet) which I never knew were there.  In a few weeks time my garden is going to be a carpet of colour – I can hardly wait!  Those green shoots have been growing quietly for some time, but it was only when the ‘packaging’ was removed that their emerging glory was revealed.

The obvious ‘packaging’ in your life is your excess fat, but there is more to it than that…  Imagine yourself as the garden scene I have described.  What, I wonder, are the dead leaves in your life? Could it be unresolved hurts which you have buried under mountains of food? Maybe it is your low self-esteem which fills you with guilt and shame and causes you to seek comfort in eating? Is it the dead leaves of a stressed-out life, filled with worry and care?  Or is it a pervading sense of deadness that you feel in the inner recesses of your soul as you seek to fill the void  with cake!

Don’t allow dead leaves to destroy the beauty of your life! God is the Master Gardener and you are his garden. Cosmetically you may feel that it is an ugly mess, but take heart – underneath the dead leaves there lies a thing of remarkable beauty.  Simply allow God to gently remove the dead foliage and then His glory is going to blossom forth.  Remember it is God who is at work within you to will and to do of His good pleasure.  It does not yet appear what you shall be, but He is changing you from one degree of glory into another as you yield to Him.