Weeds

We specialise in growing weeds. Literally. Our garden is huge and absolutely full of them. Weeds. Everywhere. We seem to spend our lives battling them. Very often, we get distracted for a while by the everyday realities of life, and then they multiply faster than the flowers ever do.

There’s one that I’ve been doing battle with lately. It’s got a little pink flower that looks sweet and innocent and, because of that, I left it alone for too long before I realised it was a weed and was taking over the world! It covers every inch of bare soil and sends out feelers that attach to both the plants and the dirt where it multiplies over and over. I could spend endless days pulling up the individual twigs that entangle and threaten to suffocate the flowers.

But, today, I’ve just discovered that, actually, a dozen or more stalks come from one root. Beneath the many bushy top growth is a hub. So, if I follow any individual stem down into the undergrown far enough, I can locate the actual hub. When I dig down into the soil around that and pull out the root, a whole bush comes with it. It’s so effective and saves so much time. Getting to the root actually does work. Who knew?

Looking at these plants, I’ve been pondering how, sometimes in the painful details of our life, we can be so aware of the ‘weeds’ that we need to do battle with. They can seem overwhelming. Maybe we struggle with a pull towards certain addictions, certain ways of trying to bring comfort to the places where we feel pain, or anxiety, or rejection. Maybe we dumb our senses with drugs, maybe we fill our emptiness with food, or shopping or pornography. Maybe we strive to protect ourselves by, bit by bit, closing our lives down and hiding in isolation. Such behaviours might start as a way of distracting ourselves from the harsh realities of our days, but eventually they can take on a life of their own and become such strongholds that truly are out of our control.

As I work in my garden, I ponder how these surface issues are like the tops of the weeds, the obvious bit that we see, where the weed heads multiply and the seeds are produced, which then spread far and wide into the rest of the garden. I could spend all my time pulling one after another out, endlessly. There could be a sense of satisfaction especially if a particular weed comes apart easily and the tops detach quickly from the stems lower down and the garden looks better without them.

But the truth is that the roots are still there, and the undergrowth is thick with stems ready to push up and out, tenfold to replace the few I’ve snapped off. Digging out the root is what I really need to do. And that starts by me recognising there’s a problem, humbly and honestly bringing it to God and asking for His ways of dealing with it.