Crepe Myrtle

What a strange month this has been. I feel a bit like a yo-yo with the emotions. I choose to have a good attitude. I choose life !!! When I got home from church tonight I thought, I need to water my crepe myrtle. I planted her last year as a start in the beatification of my back yard garden. I was surprised at it's somewhat wilted condition. We have had so much rain to the point that the ground was saturated and then after just a few days of heat it is suffering. As I watered her I thought about how I do that sometimes. I'll soak in the presence of God and just get saturated, New life , new confidence begins to bud and then I'll get out of the rain and allow the troubles of this world bring heat and before you know it I begin to wither. How silly of me, thank you Lord for grace and mercy. I have another tree in the back yard. When I moved in it was in early February and so there were no leaves and quite honestly the tree looked dead. Someone had drilled holes in it and set fire to it. There was a part of a chain as if an animal had been chained there and the bark was missing from being worn off by the chain, at the trunk a large portion of that is dead and barely hanging on . What a prophetic picture I'm getting as I write this out. When Spring came, so did the buds. Beautiful green life was forming on that dead body. Yes there are indeed dead limbs, but amidst them, there is life. I'm that way too, there are dead places (praise God), but thriving among them is life. I was advised that just before Fall I should go out with a can of spray paint and mark the dead areas so that when Winter sets in I can cut off the dead areas. To do that in the Spring would cause the tree to go into shock and die. I'm sure it will look quite odd to have painted notches on it this Winter, but the paint will fade and new life will emerge. It surely makes me look at the "Winters" of my life differently. God is so merciful to prune off the dead areas so that life can abound.