A Garden for All Seasons
Posted on: March 10, 2014
- In: Everyday Life | Faith | Seasons of the Church Year
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Here we are on March 10th, and for those of us in the Ottawa area, the ground is nowhere in sight. Although the brown grass should be peeking through the snow by now, Old Man Winter is hanging on and may even bring us more snow.
As much as I love winter, even I’ve had enough of snow and long for an end to boots-and-gloves weather. I look forward to seeing the grass green up and flower stems emerge, and I enjoy poring over my bulb catalogues and envisioning my garden in the spring. So this post title isn’t as strange as it might seem at first glance.
Only I’m not talking about a garden of flowers, but instead the one mentioned in Sirach 40:17:
Kindness is like a garden of blessings,
and almsgiving endures forever.
Charitable giving goes hand in hand with prayer and fasting during Lent, but it’s never out of season. Neither is kindness.
But if we still need a nudge to make more of an effort to give more and be kinder, I recently read in livehappy magazine that March 20th is the International Day of Happiness, first declared by the United Nations in 2012. We could make a point that day of offering a kind word or a small gesture to brighten someone else’s day.
While we may never know the difference that word or gesture makes in that person’s day or life, we do know that God wants us to show his love to our neighbours and that our acts of giving to others also bless us.
And so I pray that we would consider the ways we can extend kindness and give to others—not only on the International Day of Happiness, and not only during Lent, but also going forward.
(*Scripture quote taken from the Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition.)
A Catholic Convert in Ottawa 