Weeds Among Wheat

I love morning glories. They come in a series of stunning colors and, if you don’t catch them, you’ll miss them popping open to enjoy the beauty of the day before closing. Forever! They only last for a day, but I love them for their beauty and for the reminder that each day is truly precious. We need to make the most of each day. Glories always remind me of that. In addition to their beauty, they are vines. If you aren’t prepared to deal with it, then the glories can sometimes be a pain. Once their growth is in full swing, that vine will creepy crawl it’s way all through your flower bed, up trellises, fences, and wherever else it can spread it’s…vines. If you maintain it, it can be really beautiful. But as I said, the pain and frustration is in the lack of maintenance. The danger with its rapid growth is that it can choke out other flowers that may be trying to blossom in your garden because it’s nature is to crawl. It does so without respect of other flowers.

I have some glories that I planted when I first moved into my new home. I remove them at the end of each summer and allow them to grow fresh each year and start a new crawling journey. This year, they took a different path from the usual and crawled over a stone hedge to tamper with some other flowers I have planted. It caught my attention as I was leaving the house this morning and I recognized that I needed to unwind it and redirect its path or my other flowers would soon perish under its grip. As I continued my drive on to work, it made me think about how the adversary, cunning as he is, uses tactics that tend to mirror the same behavior. 

When I think about things like this, gardening is often my favorite analogy because it seems so simplistic. If you’ve heard of or seen gardens and flowers, then you’ve likely heard about weeds as well. What it took me some time to learn was how deceptive weeds could be in their appearance.  They may look just as pretty as flowers, but can be very detrimental to the overall health of your garden. You better believe that our spiritual living is the same way. Shaving off things from the surface isn’t enough. Some weeds develop roots that have buried themselves deep within. When we wonder why that thing or that issue keeps resurfacing, it’s likely not just a “re-test”. It’s because we’ve allowed some things to take root and we’re only cutting off what has been exposed. So it keeps coming back. True removal, in order to prevent regrowth, involves uprooting.

With gardening, we may want to consult an expert before we don the gloves and start pulling up everything. Likewise, with our spirit, we need to trust God’s expertise. Allow him to do the removing. It’s easy to assume we know what’s best for us. I remember hearing someone say once that if it were up to us, we’d never go through anything! That’s true. Life would be so much simpler, wouldn’t it?! Perhaps. But I find that in going through the tests that I encounter I’m learning to truly exercise my faith. So while many things have been uprooted from my garden, there is still plenty of weeding that God is doing. It would be wise for us not to interrupt his work. Those hard trials that we often encounter are just that. Hard trials. But there is always hope in remembering that our God is bigger than any snake trying to conceal itself in the grass and God is certainly more powerful than any weeds attempting to snuff out your true blooms. 

Stay Sunny! 

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