The Garden Behind the Locked Door

In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, young Colin Craven has spent his entire childhood confined to a darkened bedroom, convinced he is dying. Servants tiptoe around him. His father cannot bear to look at him. The whole household conspires to keep him comfortable in his illness — which only makes him sicker. Colin's real affliction is not his body but his isolation. He has been so thoroughly protected from pain that he has also been sealed off from everything that gives life.

Then Mary Lennox, stubborn and unpolished, wheels him outside into a walled garden that has been locked for ten years. Colin feels wind on his face for the first time. He touches soil. He watches a robin build a nest. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the boy who believed he would never stand begins to walk.

Burnett understood something that Scripture has always taught: healing rarely happens in isolation. The Psalmist cried out, "He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds," yet even Christ healed people in the open — at wells, on roads, in crowded rooms. He pulled them out of their locked gardens.

Some of us have been living in darkened rooms of our own making, so accustomed to managing our pain that we have forgotten what fresh air feels like. The Lord does not heal us by leaving us alone with our wounds. He wheels us into the light, sets our hands in the dirt, and says, "Now grow."