Devotion

To Kill A Weed
by Amy Browning

Ah, gardening. The joy of getting your hands dirty, planting seeds, and then watching them grow and flower. It's truly a miracle of life.

For some people anyway. For me it's an exercise in patience and it is patience that is not often rewarded. More often that not my plants die, my flowers wither, and my bulbs get eaten by a stray dog from down the street. And yet every year I struggle again to grow something that will brighten up our front yard and cause people to want to stop and admire the beauty planted in those few feet of soil.

Of course people do stop. They just stop to wonder what in the world I was trying to do with my yard. As the whispers increase I can almost hear the bets being placed. Was it intentional? Was it a giant mistake? And how did she manage to kill the petunias in such a horrible way? Oh yes, springtime brings many challenges to my household. My husband gets almost as much speculation about his mowing skills. Did he mean to let the grass get knee high before attempting to cut it? Did he mean to mow in those crooked lines? Now it is not the poor guy's fault that he has allergies and they may cause his eyes to water a bit while mowing, thereby blurring the lines a little. We are just a gardening/yard work impaired couple.

We have tried for three summers now to attempt a thing of beauty in our yard and have failed miserably every year. I will not, however, give up. I will just plan a new strategy. The jungle type garden look. Allow any green thing that wants to grow to take over my beds. They will be a veritable waterfall of color and will no doubt bring people from miles away to see this exotic display. As I sit and daydream of such a triumph for a few minutes I must come back to reality.

Weeds are not anyone's idea of beauty or art. They are meant to be pulled out and thrown aside as soon as possible. They impede a garden and kill the truly beautiful plants that share the soil. Much as in my own life I would imagine. As poor as I am at gardening if I allow that same poor talent for weeding to exist in my spiritual life I will soon be dead in a sea of weeds and sins.

There are so many weeds that already exist that I never see until they are threatening the entire well being of my heart's garden. There are the weeds of jealousy, pride, a complaining spirit, and laziness. Then there are also the weeds of haughtiness, lying, gossip, and strife. There are more but these are the few that come to mind right away. I have seen them and still do see them at work in my own life. They rise up quickly and attempt to choke out any fruit that God is cultivating in my heart.

I feel that I have learned to be content and so I allow myself to get slack in my weeding and the next thing I know I am swallowed up in a great big weed called complacency.

Or maybe one called complaining. I will be content but only if I can complain about everything first. How I must hurt the heart of God when I allow such weeds to take over. I can feel them try and wind themselves around my heart and drag me down.

The weed of jealousy is so hard to see at first and then when it is seen it is an ugly one to have around. Jealousy has no place in my garden and yet a single glance at a neighbor with more money or prettier or smarter than I is sufficient to start it growing again and again and again.

Gossip is another one that likes to enter my garden through the back door and then take prominent place in front of all. As I listen to what my neighbor is whispering to me the seeds are being sown and before I know it I am repeating what I heard and allowing the seeds to blossom into huge ugly vines.

These are the weeds that bother me.

I know my flower beds in front of my house will never be works of art but that is okay. It is my heart's garden that I want beautiful and fragrant. I want the heavenly Father to be able to walk there with joy and pride in his child. I want to eradicate the weeds with the biggest can of weed killer I can find. I want the Holy Bible. I want the words that are written there to be so imbedded in my heart that when the weeds attempt to take root they will feel nothing but the solid grounding of the Holy Scriptures blocking their every attempt. It is only this Holy Book that will kill every one of the weeds and allow my heart to blossom and flourish with every beautiful thing the Father wants to plant.