I spent hours in my flower gardens last weekend, stripping away the dead organic matter … mulching, transplanting, weeding.  Clearing the way for new spring life bursting through the soil, I so enjoy creating pockets of beauty all over our property.  I love garden work and look forward to the promise of new blooms each and every year.  Even though my back and shoulders require Cool Azul rubs for days after, and my knees stay red and bothered from kneeling in prickers, it’s good.  It’s a meaningful effort that results in overflowing gratification with the beauty it provides.  After all, God Himself is beauty, and I believe He desires us to bask in beauty.  Gardening is a form of self care for me, offering me the opportunity to be a beauty creator and mindful beauty observer.  Gardening offers me a reprieve from busy daily life with a quiet solitude, just me and my thoughts mixed with the sweet, soothing sounds of the natural world.

While I was clearing out the many, many prickly weeds that were attempting to overtake a particular area in my garden, I got to thinking about a few things …

First, I hate prickly weeds.  Actually, I realize I don’t much enjoy the act of weeding at all.  It’s a necessary evil that I find to be well worth the effort, but it’s an annoying job.  Still, I manage to find incredible satisfaction and joy in it.

Second, I am discovering that the garden offers unending analogies that totally relate to life.  I couldn’t help but wonder about the parallels of those pesky weeds and their translation to life’s struggles.  As I was digging and pulling prickly weeds from the very spots where my beautiful flowers were sprouting up from the ground, I thought about how those overgrown weeds were a terrific metaphor for my own struggles to live a life pleasing to God.  It’s so easy to let the weeds take over and choke out the truth and beauty, isn’t it?  Especially in these weeks (that are beginning to feel like months) of pandemic quarantining, my shortcomings feel ever-present and sometimes overwhelming.

Though I truly value the more relaxed schedule and I am grateful for the lifted requirement to spend so much time driving, I am struggling at home to lead with mercy and grace and unconditional love in the midst of this crisis.  The thing is … the needs feel suffocatingly big some days.  It feels selfish and wrong to even admit that I am struggling when so many people are sick and fighting for their lives, because I truly am grateful for my family’s health and ability to “shelter in place” in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

But the simple truth is that it’s hard, and I’m finding it difficult to get rid of these darn weeds!

Perhaps simply admitting that is a helpful step.  Especially on the eve of the oddest Resurrection Sunday I have ever experienced, may we all use this time to drench ourselves in His goodness and beauty, hanging on the words that give life and always make a way.  May His Truth cover us like a comforting blanket, reminding us that He loves us desperately and He wants us to call Him Abba, Father.

This is such a weird and unknown time, but I am rejoicing with thanksgiving that He doesn’t allow my weeds to define who I am.  In fact, He has taken them all on as His own, even though I don’t deserve it, giving me an eternal identity in Him.  May we all claim and declare His truth over the weeds in our lives, remembering that He is beauty and He, alone, has already won that battle.  I’ll keep trying to choke out those weeds though, just as the light chokes out the darkness, so I can strive to live a life that’s filled with mercy and grace and truth and goodness and unconditional love.