Don’t confuse me with a gardener. I plant flowers each year but I don’t read garden catalogs in February, longing for the moment when the snow melts enough to see the soil. I like flowers as art, the bold interplay of colors, the drama of the unfolding bud–flowers as ideas, blooming in my mind, not the real thing struggling to survive in my yard.
I have no feel for flowers. I don’t understand their needs: their longing for sunlight or shade, for sand or loam; their passion for wiggling their roots into manure. Flowers are like strangers whom I admire from a distance. In fact, when I finally get around to visiting the garden center, I can almost sense the flowers sighing with relief as my shadow moves past them. They seem to know that the ones I take home with me will never attain botanical greatness. They may not even survive the season.
Flowers and I find the basis for a relationship in our hatred for weeds. I was out hating this morning. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but I was tearing them out of the ground and leaving their limp bodies to shrivel and die without the slightest twinge of conscience. And as I worked at it, trying to push back the evidence of the Curse only slightly, I thought of the other weeding I needed to do.
My soul is a garden inclosed, as the Singer wrote: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits” (Song of Sol. 4:16). It is my garden because I live and work there. But it doesn’t belong to me. It is His. I am responsible to cultivate thoughts of Christ, to receive with meekness the engrafted Word, and to benefit from the fructifying influence of the Spirit. The life is from Christ; the fruit is the Spirit’s; the Husbandman is the Father. But I am on the weeding brigade.
What lessons enriched my weeding time this morning? Let me include five (I weeded out the rest):
1. When weeding, sooner is better than later. Weeds are tenacious! Japanese knotweed sprouts through four inches of asphalt. Bamboo grows 18 inches a day. Roots of Canada thistle spread through an area 20 feet in diameter in one season. A wormwood plant produces over one million seeds per season. A yellow nutsedge spawns almost 2,000 plants in a year. While the thistle is still tender, before the dandelion’s taproot has anchored well below the surface, before the quack grass has spread out of control, nip it in the bud. So it is with the weeds in my heart. The longer they are left to grow, the greater the influence and the greater the hold.
2. A gentle, steady application of water helps. When the ground (or heart) is hard, it’s almost impossible to uproot the cursed things. Regular exposure to the Word will soften the hold bad habits have on the soul.
3. Weeds aren’t fussy; they’ll grow anywhere. In her book, My Weeds, Sara Stein writes: “That’s one of the first things you notice about weeds. They grow in driveway gravel, on railway beds, through cracks in sidewalks…It isn’t that they must have an awful place to grow, it’s that they make do where cultivated plants cannot.” In the process, weeds steal nutrients from the soil, block sunlight, drink up the rainwater, entangle roots, and just plain take over the place. The spiritual applications should be obvious to all.
4. You have to be careful when weeding because you can do damage to the flowers. He is a dangerous man who starts weeding before learning the difference between violets and bellwort, between snapdragons and toadflax. The study of soul weeds, called Hamartiology (from the Gk. hamartanein, to miss the mark) is necessary for those serious about what the Master does and doesn’t like in His garden. The seeds of wrong thoughts spring up into noxious growth that stifles the Life in us.
5. You win or the weed does, but failure doesn’t mean you can’t try again! Weeding is a life-long work. But weed-free living is part of the blessed hope when at last the curse is removed (Rev. 22:3). Amen to that!
This Uplook features articles on Elisha, the man of God. He followed Elijah, of course, and in some ways seemed more effective in weeding the garden of Israel than his predecessor. It may be that the sixth point, learned from his life, is this: sometimes when convincing weeds to let go, a constant, steady pressure is better that a violent snatch.