How have you been enjoying the warmer weather? Maybe you’ve taken the opportunity to get outside and spend time in the garden. If so, are you someone who likes to sit and relax or someone who likes to get their hands dirty and shape the space around you?

Over the last years there have been a number of garden makeover programmes on the TV and plenty of encouragement to make the most of our outdoor spaces. From planting to outdoor structures, there is lots of advice out there for the budding garden designer.

Some of the changes that you can make have an immediate effect. Planting a bed of annuals in flower immediately brightens a colourless space. A new patio, while being a good bit more expensive, instantly transforms the look of the garden.

Yet, some alterations take a little longer to have their full effect. If you plant a biennial in its first year, such as a foxglove, you won’t get to enjoy the flowers until a year after you plant it. Or take a fruit tree. We planted a pear tree last year and it still isn’t a metre tall. I think it will be a while before we can enjoy any pears.

At our last house we decided to plant a silver birch at the back of the garden. We weren’t there long enough to see it grow and enjoy the difference it would have made.

All this reminds me of a picture somebody once gave me to try to explain the difference between the shortness of this life and the length of eternity. Imagine planting an oak tree in your garden. It grows and grows and becomes a mature tree – a thousand years old.

One day you go out and realise you’ve put it in the wrong place. What do you do? You cut it down and plant another. What! But it took a thousand years to get that big! Yes, but what’s a thousand years? It’s nothing … this is eternity.

Can you imagine time in that way? Centuries and millennia are not the great units of time that we normally see them as; they are but short moments. How different is that to our experience now? Our lives here can seem long, but in comparison to the length of eternity they are but a fleeting breath.

Why do I write about this? The Bible tells us that its message is for us now. It tells us that Jesus can make a difference in our lives today. Yet, that isn’t all. The Bible also speaks about eternity. Its message extends to what will happen when this life finishes.

If eternity is real, then we will spend more time there than here. Surely then, it is something we should be thinking about.

If you want to get in contact to talk about God or what the Bible has to say you can contact us at the church or through our contact page.