Gardening is Cheaper Than Therapy!

Wow, quite a bit of time has passed since my last post. I guess it's time for me to sit down with a cup of coffee and do a bit of catching up.

I have been working on clearing a rather large flower garden of about two years worth of weeds. The garden isn't mine, it belongs to my husband's grandmother and she has been physically unable to care for it for quite some time. So I began weeding it simply because I wanted to be out working in a garden and don't actually have one of my own. Plus, I know how much her flower garden means to her so it was just a nice thing for me to do.

While weeding her flower garden (which I'm not finished with yet), a few realizations came to me. First, weeds are really good things to take your frustrations out on. You can rip them up from the ground, throw them anywhere you want and throw them as hard as you want. You can scream at a weed, get an attitude with a weed and call it all sorts of names and no one cares. No one gets their feelings hurt, and you don't have to watch what you say or be nice to them. Second, working in a garden is a good time and place to talk to God. Third, you can get deeply lost in thought and contemplation about your life and things that are going on. And all three of these things can lead to all sorts of revelations.

One revelation that I've come to is that our lives are a lot like gardens. When properly cared for the garden can be so beautiful, but when not taken care of, things can become just as frustrating as a garden with two (or more) years of weeds.

In nature, there is rain an storms, and the same holds true for out lives. Weed seeds can drop into the gardens of our lives from anywhere, something we hear, something we see, something we think and even things we say. When the rain and storms come the weed seeds begin to grow. And there are all sorts of weeds. Some are easy to pull up and some spread out their roots, creep across the ground and wrap themselves around the plants we want to keep and can choke the plants to death. Often we look for the quickest and easiest ways to get rid of the weeds so we cut them off with clippers or run through them with a mower. When we do that, it looks like we have effectively taken care of the weeds. But in reality we have made our problem worse because "quick fixes" often allow the weeds to drop more seeds and the roots of the original weeds are still there, so they begin to regrow and the seeds they've dropped begin to sprout. Now we have two (or more) times the amount of weeds as we had to begin with! And after a while it all becomes so frustrating that when you take a good look at it you don't really know exactly the best approach to take or exactly where to begin. Sometimes this feeling of frustration and being overwhelmed causes us to try to ignore it and do nothing. But eventually it just gets so weedy and so thorny that there isn't any beauty left in the garden and the weeds are so thick that they become impossible to ignore any longer.

When our gardens get to this point the first thing we have to do is take a walk through the garden and really take a good, hard look at ALL of the plants that are growing there. Then we have to figure out which plants are the ones that are supposed to be in the garden, and which ones are weeds!

In the gardens of our lives, the plants that we want growing are: love, joy, peace, longsuffering (patience), gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance. These are the plants that contain the ability to produce an abundance of beautiful blooms that will make us happy and from time to time, make others take notice of our beautiful gardens.

The plants in our gardens that are weeds are: anger, jealousy, selfishness, resentfulness, impatience, bitterness, deceitfulness, harshness and hatred. Almost all of these have very deep roots and some of these invite other weeds. Some of these are not immediately easy to recognize because they try to hide within the plants we wish to keep or they try to look like a good and beautiful plant. Let's face it, some weeds look pretty but that doesn't change the fact that they are a weed!

When we realize exactly which plants are which, there is only one solution to fixing our garden. We have to methodically remove the weeds by their roots! And yes, that is hard work, it's time consuming and it can cause some aches and pains during the weeding process. However, the end result is that by getting rid of these weeds they can no longer steal the sunshine, water and fertilizer from the plants the we want to thrive.

Also, we have to diligently continue to walk through our gardens and take a good look at out plants because the weeds will always continue to try to invade and take over again. It is much easier to pull a weed when it first begins to sprout than it is to try to pull that same weed if it is allowed to continue to grow for a while.

There is yet another interesting aspect to our gardens. Both the wonderful plants and the weeds are capable of reproducing by making seeds and spreading them. Every person we come in contact with have a garden of their own. Some people don't want beautiful plants in their gardens, they only want the weeds because weeds never require any hard work or maintenance. And sometimes our gardens can spread the seeds of the beautiful plants to the gardens of others, and their plants with share seeds with us whether they are the plants we want or weeds! And once someone decides that they don't want any unnecessary weeds sprouting in their own gardens, they often choose to try to avoid people who grow more weeds than good plants.

I've realized that my personal garden got over rand with weeds, and I decided that I was tired of the weeds hiding and killing my good plants. So, I'm wading through the weeds and struggling with getting their roots out. Some I've discovered have such deep roots that I can't physically pull the root out. No, I'm going to have to get a shovel and dig VERY deep to get the roots of those weeds out.

So, what's growing in your garden? Is it beautiful plants or weeds?