The weeds
I don’t garden much, which is to say, not at all. I have an aversion to, well, yucky things like worms and bugs, and although I’m okay with dirt, I don’t like it as much as I did when I was a kid.
But I understand the concept of weeds, mostly because my mother is from a family who can grow anything, anywhere. It’s not just luck; they know their stuff. My grandma would point out and tell me the names of the wildflowers at 70 miles an hour on the highway, probably to distract herself from my dad’s driving. Sadly, in inherited none of the green-thumb gene.
Back to the weeds… The idea is that if you catch them when they are small, you’re golden. Yank those babies out and you’re good for a while. By the way, it doesn’t work to just pull the top part off – you have to get the roots. All of them. Who knew?
Needless to say, my mom had her hands full when I would help her in the garden.
And all this work – only to have weeds come back within a couple of weeks! Seems like a lot of trouble to go to.
But I was thinking about how our thought life is a lot like a garden… If we let the harmless little weeds (maybe it’s not a weed? Who can tell?) go even for a little while, pretty soon they are bigger than the good things we wanted to grow. And they’re hungry. (Feed me, Seymore!)
Yes, it’s an awful lot of work to manage my thought life… Stress? Worry? Doubt? Complaining? Self-pity? Pride? There are so many varieties of weeds! And each one of them can choke out the life that God wants to grow in me.
Better get my weeder-thingy (or whatever that little fork-y guy is called)…
So I am guessing that Neil will unpack a lot of this over the next couple of days. We should have our trowels ready (or little fork-y guys) to pull out those weeds before they get too big.
ReplyDeleteMichele I like you analogy of the weeds and gardening. Such an easy way to picture and abstract thing like our thought life.
John 15:1-3 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.