S11.10 | From Graves to Gardens: How God Brings Life from What Feels Dead
Have you ever felt buried under shame, trauma, or brokenness—like you were living in a grave? The good news is that God specializes in resurrection. In this episode of Affirming Truths, Christian Mental Health Coach Carla Arges unpacks what it really means for God to turn our graves into gardens.
Drawing from Scripture, personal testimony, and the natural process of growth, Carla shares how the Lord transforms the dead and barren places of our lives into something beautiful and fruitful. You’ll learn why healing is seasonal—requiring planting, waiting, pruning, and then blooming—and how to partner with God in that process.
If you’ve been praying for breakthrough but feel stuck in a season of waiting, this episode will remind you of God’s promise: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19).
Did you know that Carla is a Christian Mental Health coach?
See if working with her is what you need in your current season.
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3 Key Takeaways from This Episode
A Grave Isn’t the End—It’s the Soil for New Life.
Sometimes what feels like burial is actually planting. God uses our brokenness as the ground where new growth begins.
Gardens Grow in Seasons.
Healing takes time—planting seeds, waiting in faith, allowing God’s pruning, and then seeing the fruit. Don’t despise the waiting season; roots are being formed.
God Turns Pain into Purpose.
Your greatest wounds can become your greatest ministry. Just as compost nourishes future growth, God uses what once looked like waste to bring forth fruit and blessing.dom.
🔗 Want to Go Deeper?
Are you ready to partner with God to move from graves to gardens in your own life? I have a few spots open for 1:1 coaching this fall, where I help women heal trauma, renew their minds, and live in their God-given identity.
Inquire about 1:1 coaching ---> Book a FREE Discovery call
Connect With Carla:
Foundations to Healing—-> https://www.carlaarges.com/foundations-of-healing
Inquire about 1:1 coaching ---> Book a FREE Discovery call
Come hangout on IG with me @carlaarges
Check out the blog
Resources:
5 Steps to Building Resiliency
Affirming Truths Facebook Community
5 Tips for Overcoming a Negative Body Image
Who You Say I Am Biblical Affirmation Cards
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Hey friends. Welcome to this week's episode of Affirming Truths. So I love to listen to worship music. I love to have it playing in the background. I fall asleep to it and one of the songs that. I can listen on repeat is Graves into Gardens by, I think it's Elevation Worship and Brandon like, and it goes, you know, I won't sing it, but you turn graves into gardens, you make beauty from ashes.
And it's just such a hopeful song of God's promise and it got me thinking. About what does it look like to have a grave turned into the A garden? Right? This song professes from scripture that God takes the dead, the barren, the broken places in our lives and transforms them into gardens of beauty and life and [00:01:00] fruitfulness.
What does that actually. Look like. What does that look like? And I want us to talk about that today, and I want us to also talk about it with an understanding of how gardens work. I think sometimes when we. Think about turning graves to gardens. We think of constant bloom, but gardens and transformation is a process that happens in seasons.
There's planting and waiting and pruning, and then yes, of course, eventually the blooming, but there is seasons, and I'm reminded of that. I live in a place where we have four seasons. And we are getting into fall, and leaves are starting to change color and soon that they'll fall. And what does that mean?
I want us to really think about how a grave [00:02:00] represents death, loss and finality, but how God in his goodness takes that and transforms it into a garden. Graves are symbolic of dead places in our lives, right? The hopelessness, the shame, the broken dreams, loss trauma, or even the consequences of our own sin and our own choices.
I know for me, there's been different graves in my life that I have felt buried. Under trauma and mental illness, I have felt dead and broken under the pain of things that I did while I was manic, or things that I did when I was dysregulated. I have felt buried under the shame of choices I made as a [00:03:00] homeless addicted.
Teenager full of trauma and just so broken. And yet in that I am encouraged that while the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. We read that in Romans 6 23. That is the transformation that our sin should bring us death, but the gift of God is eternal life. That garden, that bloom, that beauty from ashes.
The thing is, a seed must be buried before it can grow. And sometimes what feels like a grave is actually the soil where God plants new life. He takes that grave, grave, he toils in the soil. He plants new seed, and that is so, so incredible. You know, when I look back at the [00:04:00] times that I felt buried, it was hard.
It felt like there was no life. I was, I felt hopeless. I felt like my future joy, you know, peace was all out of reach. And when I started my healing journey, when I partnered with God in bringing restoration to my life, I didn't get the flowers right away. But what happened is he started to. Till the soil.
He started to turn over what was broken clay, dead sorrow, a soil, and breathe new life in it, and started to take those broken pieces in the dirt and transform them into seeds that would create a beautiful garden in my life one day that I get to live in right now, [00:05:00] which is so beautiful. But there was a place in time where I couldn't see that.
Here's the thing. Oftentimes we pray for God just to remove the pain of our trauma or the consequence of our sin, or the shame of the lies spoken over us. We want God to instantly remove them. And we pray, heal me from this, save me from this, remove this from me, give me some relief. And what we want is instantaneous removal of pain.
But with that, we don't get the transformation with that. We don't actually get to see the garden in the full sense because a garden goes through these seasons. You know, God doesn't waste anything and our pain [00:06:00] would actually be wasted if he simply removed it. Instead, God wants to partner with us, and I'm reminded of this even in the story of Noah, God was sending rain.
God could have supernaturally put Noah and his family on the tallest mountain peak. Flooded the rest of the world. He didn't do that. He gave Noah direction. He told Noah to do actions, which were probably felt silly at the time, but Noah had to partner with God to see. The garden that was going to come out of the grave of brokenness after the flood.
He had to partner with God. You know, when we think about Mary and bringing Jesus into the world, and she was highly favored and that's so [00:07:00] amazing, but she had to partner with God. She said, here's your hand servant. And then we read that she had to lean into the pains of labor. She wasn't spared the pain of labor to bring Jesus into the world, right?
She still had to go through the process of pregnancy and of labor in order to see this garden bloom. And so I wanna encourage you that where you are maybe in a grave season and you're praying for the garden that you need to partner with God in this. Where you have unforgiveness, you need to lean into forgiveness where you haven't renewed your mind.
You have to start doing that practically every day. Where you have unhealed wounds, you have to, you know, work with me. As a mental health coach, go to therapy, [00:08:00] do work to help navigate that into healing, and it's in that process. God transforms the grave bed into a garden bed. And what is a garden? A garden symbolizes life and beauty and nourishment and fruitfulness.
We read in the song of, so, uh, song of Solomon. See, the winter is past. The rains are over in God. Flowers appear on the earth. The season of singing has come. We know that in Christ we are a new creation. The old, the dead, the berry is gone and the new the life is here. Gardens go through seasons though.
There's the planting. That's where we surrender our pain to God, where we surrender our brokenness to God and we partner with [00:09:00] God. In preparing the soil, trusting God with your pain, doing your part in surrendering the seeds into the soil. Then there's the waiting where nothing visible seems to be happening yet, but the roots are forming.
This is where you're actually doing some of the work. You know, I, I tell my clients when we're working on renewing their mind, like there are some things that you have to do every day that are simple but aren't gonna look like they're doing much at first. That is the time the roots are being formed, where faith in the unseen is happening.
Then as the plant starts to emerge from the soil, guess what happens next? The bloom. No, not yet. There's the pruning. There's removing that which hinders growth. God, cutting away lies, God, cutting away sin, God, cutting away habits. Maybe [00:10:00] God cutting away people and relationships. There's pruning and pruning can be painful.
Pruning doesn't always feel great. Pruning. Pruning comes with its own level of pain and discomfort, but what is God doing? Preparing the best bloom? And then we go into the season of blooming where fruit and beauty appear in time when the transformation is no longer internal and below the soil. But this is a time where others can see the transformation in you, and it starts to have the rippling effect through your family, through the generations God never leaves you.
And the great friend resurrection is his specialty. Resurrection in his specialty. It's your job once he takes you to the garden, to not go back to the [00:11:00] grave. To not go back. To visit what was dead, but to live in the resurrection. So how does this actually happen? Right? Well, one through his resurrection, power.
Power, the greatest grave to garden moment with Jesus resurrection. And here's the exciting thing. In Romans eight 11, we read the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. He lives in you. That resurrection power is alive in you. That resurrection power that turns graves to gardens is alive in you.
You need to activate it, not just by having more faith, not just by praying more, but to partner with God and act in ways of active faith, even when it's hard, even when it's painful, even when you're not seeing the bloom yet. [00:12:00] The second thing on how God turns graves into gardens in our lives is through the renewal of our minds.
Dead thought patterns keep us in a dead life. Core beliefs rooted in lies of trauma. Keep us living in brokenness, keeps us in the grave places. So we need to renew our mind and replace those dead thoughts with truth, with life. We know God's word is what? Living waters. Living waters. Scripture says, do not conform to this pattern of the world, but be transformed by what the renewing of your mind.
Ask where transformation is. And so we have to, in the renewing of our mind, pull out the weeds of the garden and replace them with good seeds, planting [00:13:00] God's word into our thought life. And I have a whole system on how I do this with my one-on-one clients. That is powerful and simple. The third thing is.
God turns grace into gardens through healing and restoration. Where there is grief, he brings comfort Where there is broken identity, he gives us a new name and purpose. God waters the soil with his love until new growth comes through. There's healing and restoration again in partnership with us. In our surrender, in our walking through hard conversation and us sitting with hard emotions with us doing the uncomfortable work.
And then he brings fruitfulness in formerly broken places. [00:14:00] The very area of pain becomes the place of greatest ministry. I have seen this so vividly in my. Own life. My greatest pain in my trauma and in my mental illness has now become my greatest ministry as I coach others today to be overcomers as I coach people today on how to partner with the Holy Spirit and turn their graves into gardens.
Through this podcast, through my partnership with the Bible op, God has transformed my pain into ministry, and that's what he wants to do in your life too. So you can have a ministry in your family, so you can have a ministry to others who are overcoming broken places that you are familiar with. You know what looks like waste and decay?
God transform into compost to become rich soil for future growth. [00:15:00] And so what does this look like in daily life? To have your broken places, to have your dead places, to have the graves of your life turned into beautiful gardens to see ash turn to beauty. One, it's about being honest, where you feel buried.
Where do you feel buried? Where do you feel dead? Where do you feel stuck in grief? Shame, fear. We need to invite God into those places. Allow God to see us in those places. And then it is taking small daily steps, renewing your mind, resting, allowing the Holy Spirit to prune walking in obedience. And not doing this on your own, but doing it with the [00:16:00] people God will bring alongside you to guide you, to support you, to encourage you.
Just like we don't see flowers the day after planting seeds, transformation takes patience, but God is so faithful in those unseen seasons. What's one grave area in your life that you're asking God to transform into a garden? What's one area in your life that you want God to come and bring fruitfulness?
What's one area in your life that maybe you've been praying over but you haven't been taking action over? That you haven't partnered with God in Action. Here's my affirming truth for you today. God is turning my graves into gardens. What was once [00:17:00] dead will live again in Christ. And my scripture for you.
The anchoring verse is from Isaiah 43 19. See, I am doing a new thing now. It springs up. Do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. I wanna encourage you as you think about this podcast episode this week, to journal about what is a grave in your life, and write down a scripture, a promise to plant in that soil.
Remember, gardens grow in seasons. Don't despise the planting or the waiting or the pruning. Blooming will come. And as you take steps of faith in action to partner with God, I want you to consider. Inviting me into that [00:18:00] process with you. I have a few one-on-one spots for coaching, opening up for September and October, and if you feel God ing you, I wanna invite you to book a discovery call with me just to explore what working one-on-one looks like and if in fact your garden area.
Or your grave area is where God has gifted me to partner with him to bring life. You can find the booking link in the show notes here on my website, guys. God is turning your grave into a garden. What was once Dead will live in Christ again. Amen. Amen. Special note, I have a bonus episode for you on Thursday, an interview with someone that is going to just speak so much life into you.
So look out for that this Thursday. Be blessed [00:19:00] guys.