The Perfect Garden
Don’t you love garden magazines and books? It’s like entering another world when you turn those pages.
Here’s a woman who lives in the South. She has a charming white picket fence that is covered with old-fashioned, romantic roses. Their pale pink, peony-sized blossoms in thick clusters climb up trellises and down to the street. Inside the fence it looks like the movie, The Secret Garden. Roses billow and spill over onto garden paths dotted with fragrant lavender.
Another article shows me a woman who lives in the country. Her garden is bursting with a riot of old-fashioned flowers. Hollyhocks, black-eyed Susans, and rainbow-colored zinnias line her fieldstone walkways next to her barn. Nearby in a field of poppies, her granddaughters are wearing straw hats and having a tea party under a cornflower-blue sky.
Scroll to the bottom to download your free catalog list to create your (nearly) perfect garden!
Whenever I see such picture-perfect gardens, I want to walk right into the pages and live there. Sometimes I’m even jealous. I wonder, How can she get her plants to all look so perfect?! It doesn’t seem fair. I’m sure I work just as hard, and yet my garden is never that orderly. But I know things aren’t always as they seem.
No matter how perfect and orderly those gardens are we see in books, magazines, and public gardens, I’ll let you in on a secret. They are faking it. I know this because I used to work in advertising.
Whenever our agency oversaw a photo shoot for a product, we would make sure everything looked perfect. If a glass of milk needed to look frosty and inviting, we would put a gel-like substance, similar to rubbery glue, on the outside of the glass. That gave it an ice-cold, frosty look. The minute a piece of lettuce wilted under the hot lights, we would replace it with another, over and over again. Produce was misted with a product that beaded-up to make it look just-washed fresh. Lingerie models had their thighs, moles, and other imperfections caught on camera altered on the computer to make themselves and the lingerie look better.
All this “image management” for perfection happens in garden photo shoots too. Every dead flower head is removed, so the whole plant looks as if it burst into bloom all at once. In your garden and mine, flowers come and go intermittently over several weeks. In the photographed garden, every open space in the flower borders is filled in with a potted plant. They either bury the pot or take it out and plant it, but just the same, they fake it. Everything is trimmed and neatened like your garden would be, too, if you had a staff to help you.
In real gardens—yours and mine—weeds exist. Real gardens have plants die for no apparent reason. Real gardens don’t grow all tidy and perfect; sometimes half the plant is in bloom, the other half bedraggled. Real gardens have plants that need to be staked for support, plants that have to be pruned to make room for others, and some plants that have to be ripped out and moved to other locations. Real gardens are not picture-perfect. That is a contrived, artificial look reserved for photo shoots and professional staffers who specialize in making things look good.
We should remember this when we look at another’s “perfect” life. That just isn’t a reality concerning the human condition. Nothing and nobody (except Jesus Christ) is perfect. It’s good for us to remember when we see someone’s life that looks perfect to us, things aren’t always as they seem.
I remember a Bible study I attended when I was a new Christian. In walked this beautiful woman. She had naturally white-blonde, curly hair. It feathered softly around her exquisite, creamy porcelain face. Her figure was elegant. Not stick thin, and not an ounce of fat. She wore a soft blue cashmere outfit that perfectly complemented her delicate and stunning beauty. She was soft-spoken and nice. She was dating the handsomest guy in our group. I felt uncomfortable and unattractive in comparison. Everything about her is perfect, I said to myself, trying not to stare or be overcome by jealousy.
Then during the prayer time, she asked for prayer for her brother and herself. She began to talk about her brother being in jail and earlier years of incest between them. My jaw sagged open. Suddenly, I wouldn’t trade places with her for anything in the world.
I think about that day whenever I see someone’s life that on the outside looks perfect. They seem to have the perfect marriage, the perfect home, the perfect children, and they never struggle with their weight. But I know things aren’t always as they seem. I know I’m not seeing the full story. And furthermore, I know better than to play the comparison game. My pastor, Walt Gerber, said something I wrote in the back of my Bible to memorize: “The recipe for misery is comparison.” Comparison will make you feel miserable and so will the pursuit of the appearance of perfection. But it makes me wonder, why are we—especially Christians—so tempted to play the game of image management? Of making it appear as though everything is perfect? Why are we so afraid to be real?
One reason is fear of judgment. We know the story of Jesus and the woman at the well. We know that although she had been living with several men, He did not condemn her. And we know that when another “sinful” woman anointed Him with tears and expensive oil, He was not offended by her presence. But we also know if the town prostitute, wife-beater, alcoholic, homosexual, or drug-dealer came to our church service, he or she wouldn’t be treated the way Jesus treated those people. We would be repelled, or at least keep our distance. This lack of grace is what keeps our masks on and the secular world out of the church.
In Philip Yancey’s brilliant book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, he writes about this tendency of ours to put on a false religious front. In discussing the scene in John 8 in which a woman is caught in adultery, Yancey points out our distorted view of right and wrong versus what Jesus viewed as right and wrong:
Jesus grants absolution: “Then neither do I condemn you…. Go now and leave your life of sin” (v. 11).
Thus in a brilliant stroke Jesus replaces the two assumed categories, righteous and guilty, with two different categories: sinners who admit and sinners who deny. The woman caught in adultery helplessly admitted her guilt. Far more problematic were people like the Pharisees who denied or repressed guilt.1
Our human tendency is to appear as something we are not, to engage in image management. Faking it was a constant source of trouble for Jacob. He didn’t trust God to come through on his promise that “the older will serve the younger” (Genesis 25:23), so he contrived birthrights and blessings in his own way, without relying on God to come through. This Machiavellian attitude and pretense caused him a lifetime of trouble.
Faking his own religious power cost Moses the Promised Land (Numbers 20:2–12). David faked as if he had done nothing wrong with Bathsheba or to her husband, Uriah (2 Samuel 11:2–17). God is never fooled or impressed, and faking it always results in the loss of intimacy and real relationship with others and our God. It’s a barrier to closeness and all the good things we desire from relationships.
Image management is not pleasing to God. For Ananias and Sapphira their biggest mistake was the pretense of having given everything away (Acts 5:1–10). It would’ve been fine if they had said, “We sold our land and gave some of the money to you.” Instead, they faked it. They pretended they were more noble and giving than they really were. The popular attitude Fake-it-till-you-make-it definitely didn’t make it for them.
Jesus had some scathing and vicious words to say about the Pharisees. He called them hypocrites, blind guides, blind fools, whitewashed tombs, and snakes. With everyone else, especially sinners, He was kind and compassionate. Why was He so angry with the Pharisees? Because “Everything they do is done for men to see” (Matthew 23:5). The Pharisees cared more about image management and looking good (or holy) than being real.
True transformational power—the power to touch another’s life in a meaningful way with compassion, understanding, and authority—comes from being real. The woman who massaged and anointed Jesus’ feet with oil and her hair didn’t waste time with image management. She was aware that every man in the room knew about her lifestyle. But she was so focused on Jesus, so caught up with adoring Him, that she ceased to care what others thought. Consequently, Jesus said about her, “I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Matthew 26:13).
Have you ever tried to get close to someone who “has it all together”? These people look and act as if everything in their lives is perfect, they have no problems or struggles. It’s a monumental challenge to get close to someone such as this, and worse, it prevents the closeness and fellowship that we are meant to have with one another. I never want to share my thoughts with someone taken up with image management: They make me feel inferior and unclean. These people can fake it for a while, but they will never experience true intimacy and fellowship with their God or anyone else until they admit they are needy too.
Jesus didn’t fake it. He was angry with the money changers in the temple. He was sorrowful: He wept over the death of a friend. He was scared and anguished in the Garden of Gethsemane. Although He knew why He was dying on the cross, He wasn’t Mr. Stoic. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was his tortured cry. Jesus showed us how to be real in a world full of pretense.
One of my favorite children’s stories about being real is from the book The Velveteen Rabbit.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”2
There’s no such thing as the perfect garden or the perfect person or the perfect Christian. It’s all a sham, image management. The best we can hope for is to be real for one another. The next time you see someone who seems to have “the perfect life,” the more important question is: Are they living a life of pretense? Or are they real?
“Once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
1 Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997), 182.
2 Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (New York: Doubleday, 1958).
Download my list of favorite catalogs to plan your “perfect” garden!
Here are two pages (front and back) of some catalogs that I find to be the perfect way to plan your garden. Just click on the image to download👍🏼
