Nettled

When we bought our house in Suffolk, one of the things that attracted us was the garden. There’s a wraparound lawn and over the shared drive is the veg patch. When we moved in, it was a wilderness. Over the years, it’s changed quite a bit and now plays host to a polytunnel, two greenhouses, a rhubarb patch and a fruit garden. 

I bet as you read these words you’re visualising neat pathways, a fruit cage, glass winking in the sunlight, the distant sound of chickens clucking contentedly and tomatoes ripening on the vine. It’s not like that at all. 

Since we booted the chickens off (they eat all the veg if you leave them in summer), weeds have been growing rampantly. Nettles in particular. For the last few days, I’ve been fighting with them, pulling them up by the roots, catching myself painfully on the gooseberry bush and being scratched by brambles.

They’re horrible things. You grab them and pull in the hope that they will come up in one go. Sometimes they do, but they love to slap you with their prickly leaves and scatter tiny seeds everywhere. Other times, they snap in half and you have to go in low to administer the coup de grace. 

Normally, we get loads of raspberries and blackcurrants. Not this year. Brandishing a pair of well-worn gardening gloves and some secateurs, I have discovered that the nettles and the bindweed have wrapped themselves around said plants, choking them and interfering with their fruitfulness. They need space and light to grow and this year they haven’t had it. From a distance, all looks well, until you get up close and see what’s really going on. 

And look what I did there. A nice intro to the point of this blog, which is to give you part two of my WOWIG experience, as promised last month.

I’m a great one for deflecting. Painful memory? Push it down. Emotions welling up? Change the subject, quick! You could say that the entire first half of this blog is such a deflection, although there is a link. Trust me. 

So things that happen to other people at Christian weekends away don’t seem to happen to me. I was having a lovely time at WOWIG and didn’t expect anything of a life-changing nature to occur. 

On Sunday morning, I sat in the front row with a gaggle of chums to listen to Chantal and Jonathan Bryan’s talk about his book, “Eye Can Write.” As the presentation went on, I could hear people sniffing and see them wiping their eyes. We got into small groups to discuss a point and I was fine. Absolutely fine. Then the voice of Jonathan’s best friend began to describe an experience Jonathan had had at around the age of three when he was very ill. He recounted the story of how he found himself in a beautiful orchard. Looking down, he realised that his body worked perfectly. He could run and jump and cartwheel and he knew with absolute certainty that this place belonged to Jesus. 

The air in front of me seemed to shimmer as I heard the words. I must have been frowning or at least looking fairly serious as Chantal caught my eye and mouthed, “Are you all right?” We were asked to get into our groups together and it was if the sea parted. To my left and to my right my friends started speaking, but not to me. Not in a horrible way, and I wasn’t upset. It was meant to happen. 

I was left staring straight ahead wrestling with a new and challenging concept. Jesus has a beautiful place, a garden or an orchard or possibly both. I am welcome in it. I did not know either of those things. This knowledge hit me like a ton of bricks. I could feel emotion washing over me but I had control of it. Bursting into tears in front of people isn’t something I tend to do. In that respect I’m much like Isabella. 

I held it together until the end and then blubbed embarrassingly all over Chantal and Jonathan. A normal person would have stayed in the room and sought prayer and/or comfort from her fellow Christians, but I bolted to the loo and stayed there until everyone was safely at the worship session. I cried a lot, but it wasn’t sad crying. It was that weird, spiritual, healing kind you get sometimes. Then I went off by myself to the conservatory and had a nice coffee and did some writing. It was good. 

Since then, I’ve shared the news of the book with any number of people via social media and in person. All of them, believers and non-believers alike have been incredibly touched by it. If you haven’t read it, I would urge you to do so. Jonathan is a gifted and lucid writer, but he is so much more than that. 

Back to those nettles, then. Deep rooted, dangerous, painful. I’ve been battling them all my life. I’ve got to keep pulling them up and stopping them from choking the fruitful plants at whatever cost. That’s how it feels. 

But I can be absolutely sure that when I go to that beautiful place Jonathan described, there won’t be a single solitary one.

Images by Pixabay

Ruth is married with three children, one husband, assorted poultry and a cat. She is the author of “The Diary of Isabella M Smugge”, “The Trials of Isabella M Smugge” and is currently writing “The Continued Times of Isabella M Smugge”. She writes for a number of small businesses and charities, reviews books for Reading Between the Lines and blogs at ruthleighwrites.co.uk. Ruth has abnormally narrow sinuses and a morbid fear of raw tomatoes, but has decided not to let this get in the way of a meaningful life. You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at @ruthleighwrites and at her website, www.ruthleighwrites.co.uk.