"A Destructive Ministry Also is Necessary"

J. Edwin Orr tells of the tour where, "we walked round a beautiful garden which occupied a former piece of waste land. The gardener showed us round. 'Those are beautiful roses,' we said to him. 'I planted them,' replied the gardener, with justified pride. 'What a beautifully-cut hedge!' we remarked next. 'I trimmed that,' he said.

At the garden gate, we found an old fellow watching a smoking heap of refuse. 'What have you been doing?'

'Working at the garden,' he said.

'Well then, what have you to show for your labour?'

'Nothing, Sir,' he replied.

'Then you cannot have been working!' we told him.

'Sir,' he asserted, 'When we came here, this garden was a piece of waste land, overgrown with weeds, full of stones and sand, swampy in one corner, and pretty hopeless all round.' We got interested. 'Well, sir,' he went on, 'I broke up the land, and I destroyed the weeds, and dug out the stones, and carted away the sand, and it was my job to drain the swampy corner.' We listened with growing appreciation. 'I am saying nothing against the other fellow who planted the garden. He did his job well. But where would his planting come in if I hadn't first rooted out and destroyed the weeds?'

Both men's labour was necessary, but the rooting-out and destruction of weeds preceded the planting of flowers and shrubs."

Read J. Edwin Orr's article here.