A Wild, Free-Ranging Garden
by Donavon L Riley
When you stumble—speak out of turn, let irritation flash, or fall prey to suspicion—don’t let it devour you whole. The world is a mess of clinging vines and brambles, always pulling us toward missteps and small acts of betrayal. Weakness slips in through the smallest cracks, a word or a glance, and suddenly we’re thrown off balance. But do not sink into despair. Resist the urge to drag yourself through the mud, convincing yourself you’re beyond redemption. Those thoughts—the ones that paint you as unworthy, unfit to serve, too flawed—only tighten the chains around your spirit. Dwelling there, you’ll wrap yourself in the heaviness of self-doubt, shutting yourself off from the steady hand of grace that’s still being offered to you.
Ask yourself, why carry this weight? To live in self-condemnation is to pour salt into the wound. When you hold onto the image of yourself as broken, hopeless, you blind yourself to the nature of true growth. Life was never meant to be clean, faultless, or measured to perfection. It’s raw and tangled, a thicket where we lose our way, stumble, fall. But with each fall God is there, giving us strength to stand again, changed. The soul isn’t some polished machine to be wound up and set on a flawless path. It’s more like a wild, free-ranging garden that grows in strange and unexpected ways. What matters isn’t some impossible purity, but that we acknowledge the humbling we’ve experienced and how that turns us toward God who raises us back up, showing us our flaws, and returning us to that rough path of faith.
The beautiful irony is that in every misstep, every crack, that’s where God’s mercy creeps in. So let the flaws be there—don’t try to seal them up with guilt and despair. Those cracks are the places where the Light of Christ Jesus finds its way in, where the gentle persistence of His grace takes root. Every time you stumble and turn back, every moment you lift your eyes from the ground, that’s God’s own patience working within you, pulling you forward, even as you fall. He has no interest in polished perfection; He’s after the messy, vulnerable work of turning each stumble into a step toward Him.
In these stumbles, rest in Christ. He’s not waiting with judgment; He’s waiting with patience, a hand extended to help you up again. Let His mercy be the steady ground beneath your feet when the world spins and pulls you in all directions. This is not about personal purity; it’s about the Savior’s persistence. It’s about a deeper faith that, even in your fragility, you’re held. Christ is there, weaving strength into your weakness, raising you up. Rest in Him, in the one who knows your wounds, and lets grace pour through every crack and imperfection.