The Constant Gardener

With the return of the warm weather I have gone back to my attempts at gardening.  As I started working on the garden bed that stretches along the walkway up to my front door, I kept thinking about how much I hate gardening … well, it’s not that I hate gardening, it’s just that I’m not really any good at it.  My mom and grandma are typically the gardeners in my house, but since my grandma no longer lives with us and my mom is overseas, the responsibility has fallen to me.  How unfortunate for my garden bed.  Haha.

I found that before I could really do any planting of any sort in my garden, I had to pull up the weeds.  In the few short weeks that it’s really been nice and warm out, my poor front lawn has become infested with weeds.  Gross, annoying, pesky yellow flowers have been popping up all over the place and there’s nothing I can do to prevent them from popping up because pesticides have been outlawed where I live.  So I had no choice this week but to get down on my hands and knees with this amazing two-pronged tool with this well-placed bend in it at hand and I started weeding.  If you dig it into the ground at just the right spot on the weed, it’ll pull the whole thing out in one move.  It is seriously a good investment if you have your own lawn.

Anyway, there I am in a tank top (yes, it was that warm out) and jeans, digging out weeds in my lawn and garden bed, thinking about how this is a good analogy of God working in our lives, but just unsure how it would work.  No, I don’t typically try to find good analogies to compare God’s work in our lives to, but on this particular day I did … so random.  It wasn’t hard to do.

As I was digging through my garden bed, I came across a few weeds that were HUGE.  I mean huge, prickly, nasty-looking green things that were choking my precious hostas and baby roses – they’re the only perennial plants in my garden right now and so I’m being viciously protective of them!  When I tried to pull them up and out, they wouldn’t budge.  These suckers were firmly planted into the ground.  So I started digging.  Deeper and deeper and deeper and I still could not find the end of the roots on these monsters.  Unfortunately, at some point, as I was digging, my spade cut through the root and up came the plant, but the root of the weed was still firmly stuck in the dirt, which means that I can expect those suckers to come back sometime later this season.  This really got me thinking.  At this point, it might be obvious what I compared this experience to, but I’m going to write it out anyway because thanks to one of my former roommates, I have become more of a verbal processor (even though I’m writing this out instead of saying it out loud).

The weeds represent the sin in my life, in your life, in all of our lives.  They pop up, unannounced, unexpected, and they make a mess of things.  They make things ugly, and I mean really ugly.  These yellow flowers are not pretty.  I used to be a camp counselor for years and when my campers came up to me with dandelion wreaths for my hair I feigned happiness for their sakes, but this is the truth, they are not pretty flowers, especially when they multiply in random patches all over the place.  Likewise, this sin is not pretty, it is ugly and distracting and destructive.  I mentioned how some of the weeds were choking some of my perennial plants, well, I found one weed that was growing on top of one of my baby rosebushes and killed it. Sin does that too.  It kills our hope, our joy and it leaves us feeling empty and dead inside.

Oh sure, it makes us happy for a little while, but does it really?  It gives us a false sense of happiness.  It creates a delusion in our minds that we are O.K. and that delusion just feeds our sin more and more so that it gets bigger, taking up more space in our hearts, minds, and lives and makes it all the harder to walk away from it.  The thing is, just as easy as it is for these weeds (these sins) to just pop up in our lives and take over, it is also just as easy for us to get rid of them.

Actually, I take that back.  WE can’t actually do anything.  We can try to get rid of them, but all that will do is pull the top part of the weed out of the ground.  It’ll get rid of the visible problem, but it definitely does not take care of the root.  Our problem is not just getting rid of the flowers.  Yes, that’s helpful for a short while and it might let the other parts of our lives, or the other flowers in our garden bloom for a little while, but those weeds are just going to come back because the root is still there.

After I spent a day weeding through my garden, I went out and bought some new flowers to transplant into my garden.  The thing is, that when you’re transplanting a plant, you’re supposed to dig a hole that is twice as deep and twice as wide as the container that holds the plant, which is a lot of work.  In the process, I found myself digging up a whole bunch of random little roots and then all of a sudden BAM, I found these ugly monstrosities that were the roots of these weeds that I had pulled up the day before.  The thing was, I had dug a hole about 2 feet into the ground and I STILL couldn’t find the WHOLE ROOT!!!!!

The crazy thing is that the same thing goes for me.  There are areas and things in my life that are like these weeds.  They appear in my life and I think that it’s okay for awhile.  I get lazy and don’t really invest much time in the Word of God and then soon I stop praying and the next thing I know, these weeds … these sins have choked the life out of me.  After a chunk of time has passed, I finally find the courage, or the Holy Spirit will seriously convict me and I will try to weed this sin out of my life …. then time and again, the weed pops up.  It’s a vicious cycle that I have struggled to get out of for a long time.

I realized that for a long time, all I’ve ever done is rip the flower part of the weed out of my life, I’ve done what I can to get rid of the visible problem but the roots have still remained and getting rid of them is something that I can’t do, not on my own strength.  As cheesy as this sounds, I need the REAL Gardener to come and dig these roots out of my life and my heart.  But I need to let Him come and do the work that is necessary.  I need to let go of those roots just as much as I need God to pull them out.  The problem is that it’s sooooo tempting to just hold on to them. My other problem is that I don’t completely know what the roots to my weeds are.  Correction, I don’t know what all the roots are and for the roots that that I have identified … well, it’s been a tough and sometimes painful journey, having God reveal them to me in various ways. In the process, God has revealed much about Himself to me, and about myself.  It sometimes doesn’t help that I have fountains for tear ducts, but crying can be just as stress-relieving as sitting on a beach . . . . sometimes.  I’d still prefer sitting on a beach, but I guess I’ll just have to put up with the tears for now.

A lot of things have changed in my life over the past year.  Now, I don’t necessarily count a year as in from January to December because then the year isn’t anywhere near being up, rather, I tend to use significant moments in my life as being the landmarks by which I judge the time that’s passed.  So what’s my year marker this time? June 22, 2009, I returned home to Canada after a 10 month stint in France with Campus for Christ.  I’m about two months away from coming back to that date and I find myself re-evaluating myself and asking myself how I’ve grown, or if I’ve even grown, and how I’ve changed since then.

I also find myself trying to desperately dig around to get the roots of these weeds out of my life because I’m tired of being in this cycle. This is something that I know that I will just have to rely on God to do because my attempts have failed.  So, I’m doing it.  I’m turning over a new leaf if you will …. I’m surrendering my trowel and spade and I’m giving myself over to the gentle but strong hands of God.

Lord,

You ARE the constant Gardener.  You ARE the only one who can do anything with this rough garden that is my life and so I am trusting you with it.  Forgive me for the stubbornness and pride that have ruled my life for a long time.  Being dependent on people has never been my forte.  But then again, you already knew that because you created me and you know everything there is to know about me.  Take my heart and my life Lord.  Take them and shape them the way that only your hands can.  I love you Lord.

~Amen.