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I am a pastor and a clinical psychotherapist. My life's passion is defining healthiness from a human perspective and paralleling it to the holiness of God, divine perspective. Shifting perspectives creates a paradigm that is alongside of rather than over and against. The parakalein of God and the paradoxes of humanity are redefined. Humanity is all about winning and yet we are losing ground everywhere. Divinity is all about letting go of the desire to win and the fear of loss. The Divine embraces the world with loving care regardless of anything.

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The Garden meets the Gardner

Posted by Don Paine

I wept inside with someone who became a widower this weekend.  Strange I had just blogged about two widows now I meet a widower.  It is the same on both sides just different sides.

His wife of 66 years died leaving him alone.  He and she were in different ways "relieved and released" from the heavy burden of a body that shackled a soul.

As he described her to me I had two visions created in my mind as I listened to her life though his words.  She was a gardener who I watched meeting the one who after his death as he was on his way to heaven, "was thought to be the gardner".  Jesus is the gardner who plants, waters and gives increase but he is also the garden in which we live and move and have our being.  So the woman gardner joins the gardner in the garden of heaven.  I could see it.

As he continued to speak about the love of his life and the life of his love, I had another vision come to my eyes of Jesus welcoming her to his garden and calling her a "woman of a green thumb and a golden heart".

Grief and grace will flow into this man and his family even through this loss as they embrace "everlasting life and live everlasting love.

As Paul Anka once wrote and sung, "if love is not forever what is forever for"!

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