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Sunday, February 16, 2025

The Parable of the Beautiful Garden

There was once a young man. He had a beautiful girlfriend. They used to love to sit together at lunchtime in school and plan their future together. They designed a home to live in and the clever lad drew up the plans and made pictures of how it would look. They discussed how they would fill this home with children and laughter. They were young and in love and very happy.

Eventually the girl went away to college to learn to be a teacher. At about the same time the young man had a stroke of good fortune. He inherited a plot of land at the edge of the town. He took out the plans they had made and he started to build, She was away for a long time and every day he worked on the house. He built every part with love and with care and made sure it was just so for their future. It was a very small house but it was perfect in every detail.

When the girl came home they were married and moved into the tiny house. She mentioned the size and the children but he just pointed to land around it and promised to make it bigger when the time came to do so.

So every month they waited expectantly. After a few months she got a job in the local school. While she was away at work the young man built her a garden and she was overjoyed with it. They would sit there in the evenings always planning their future together in the home that he had built for them. They drew up plans for the nursery, they marked out with white stones where it would stand and they waited.

The months turned into years. Every day the girl went off to work while the young man spent time in the garden. He would sit in their garden and spot a way to make it even more beautiful and he would set to work. So he planted it and nurtured each plant and built it up. He added areas of peaceful solitude, walkways, riots of colour, gorgeous smells. He loved the garden, every plant and every stone was the object of his attention. He would sit and soak up its peaceful atmosphere.

As the years went by the couple gave up waiting. The plans they had made gathered dust and were shoved to the back of a cupboard. The garden expanded all around the house, The white stones were reused and moved to one side. Everybody agreed that the garden was truly the most beautiful garden in the whole world. The young man won awards for his hard work and with each award he was spurred on to spend even more time in his beautiful garden.

So it was many years later when the miracle finally occurred and the man’s wife woke up with a secret smile. She searched through the cupboards and dusted off the plans and took them to her loving husband, and they celebrated their good fortune.

The next day she went off to work as usual, while he took the plans out into his beautiful garden to make a start on the job in hand. So he held up the plans and looked over at the building spot but he was not happy with what he saw.  Build a nursery on the rose garden? No not an option. So he had to redraw the plans in order to preserve the garden.

The next day he took pen and paper and sat down with the plans to review the situation. He couldn’t build over the fountain and a garden wouldn’t be right without a vegetable plot. He redrew those plans again and again over the next few weeks but he could not bear to part with a single part of his beautiful garden. The nursery was going to spoil the views and the aspect, it would just be downright ugly and the sound of playing would ruin the peacefulness. In a flash the final answer came to him. It would not do to spoil all that he had worked so hard for.  The child would have to go. 

Peregrin

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