Today’s Monday Musings is a look inward where I find I may, as they say, not see the forest for the trees; throw out the baby with the bath water, and so on. You’ll find my actual gardening addiction may parallel some plane of your life where the busy-ness suffocates the beauty. Dig in 🙂

I know it’s true, I’m a hypocrite; a two timer and a shell of a housewife. I’ve backslid into the wayward life of a ground grubbing, weed wrenching maniac. Just last year I wrote and spoke on the topic of letting go; releasing the weights that pull us away from embracing new seasons. I’ve said that we must let go of what holds us back from celebrating the beauty within each new season, accepting, acknowledging and praising. Oh, I have accepted (that weeds and grass rule my life); I have acknowledged (that it’s up to me to get them); and I have…uh, prais…no, it’s time to come clean, cleaner than my fingernails. My praising in the garden was beautiful that first round of dew laden blooms, before the devil woke up the nutsedge, the bermuda grass, and the wild violets. I am a compulsive gardener; I need help.

How does it happen? I walk through the gardens once a day (a tip from Mama’s cousin for a successful garden). I figured if she did so, and lived nearly 100 years, that’s all the encouragement I need! And the therapeutic effect of evicting those weeds, clearing the ground filth and watching a garden take bloom, or become a dinner plate of delicious is just beyond compare! First an innocent walk-through, and the next thing I know, I’m up to my elbows in dirt, swatting those biting flies, with blurry eyes from the salty sweat; it’s time for dinner with nothing planned, there’s laundry to do and the dust bunnies are playing. Shame. So much shame.

For those of you laughing out the words “mow it down or spray it brown”, go sit with my husband. No thank you, I love my flowers and I hate that dead brown stuff left everywhere that he escaped my guard with his Round-Up wand. So what I end up with is this. I have weeded myself into a corner; a vicious cyclic corner where I have failed to adore the beauty and the Maker of it. I am so enrapt with weeding out the bad, that I haven’t given due respect to the beauty of opening buds and unfurling leaves that are the product of my work and God’s grace. I now ask Him to rescue me, remind me of His far greater purpose for me, and to return me to the communion I had with Him in the midst of His garden.

To apply a grain of wisdom I’ve gleaned, I hope to be able to read the newspaper, listen to the news and observe the unwelcome changes in life with a new eye for the good, the grandeur and splendor of life’s garden, rather than combing the corrupt with a long handled weeder. I want to acknowledge and praise God for the bountiful blessings instead of attacking life with a hoe, and a garden trowel. What is wrong with me? Who cares if my butterfly garden seating area is clean and welcoming, if I have no time to sit and invite others into it. Who cares how clean my rows of Blue Lake bush beans are, if I never pick and share them? Likewise, who will hear about Jesus the great physician, if I haven’t made time to visit the sick? I have weeded out life’s blooms; so focused on the work and blinded to the beauty.

But the summer is young. There is time for reforming. Oh, I’m not saying I will give it up. There is so much beauty in gardening that I cannot leave it as long as there’s breath in me and God gives me the ability. The secret is in balance. Schedules work for other important parts of life; I shall schedule my dates with the dandelions, and be sure to sit a spell mid the bluebirds’ perch at the wheat field’s edge, and inhale the fragrance of the warm moist garden dirt. If I am truly nearer God’s heart in a garden, then I will be using that time to meditate on His word and plan what I might be doing for someone else before the day is gone. When I begin to feel overwhelmed, I will stop and pray for the strength to walk away.

In Jesus’ teaching, as recorded in Matthew, I read that He doesn’t want me to be so aggressive toward the evil deeds that I uproot the good that can be accomplished toward all people.  I think He was teaching us to hate the sin and love the person, and the Father will sort it all out in the end. I know that if I begin to weed or hoe the garden while the young seedlings are too small, it will uproot them too. They would never get a chance to produce fruit.

“He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field,  but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.  So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’  He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ So the servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’  But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.” (Matthew 13: 24-29 ESV)