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| Stades Market, Fox Lake, IL |
Have you ever felt excited about starting a garden? I have two dear friends who have beautiful gardens. All kinds of plants and flowers and garden decorations sprinkled throughout.
I marvel at the delicacy and work each of them put into their gardens. It takes a lot of care to grow plants, flowers and vegetables. As you may know, I planted my first two tomato plants this past summer. It took work to help them grow.
Weeds. Not many people who have gardens like weeds. After all, a weed can snuff out the growth of plants by choking the life out of them. Weeds must be removed or the health of the garden diminishes.
What about the weeds in our lives? What do those look like? They prevent us from moving forward in a positive direction. They stall our growth until they are found and pulled out by the root. They can be deceiving and look like a plant until they reveal their true identity.
Weeds are in our lives to show us what to keep out of our lives. They keep us sharp as we live our lives according to God's plan and purpose. Weeds keep us alert to what is supposed to be in our life and what we need to remove. Weeds are not hard to remove - just give them a pull and they're out.
Flowers. Beautiful colors, some are buds when they begin and they can be fragrant, pleasant to our senses. Some need to be pruned, some need to be thinned out and all of them need gentle love and water to grow.
Flowers in our lives remind us of the good things. Like what? Well, being alive for one. God chose us to be alive, at this time in history and He desires a personal relationship with us. We choose flowers as friends, a lot of us have flowers as family and each of us has the choice of how many and what kind of flowers to have in our garden.
We want our flowers to grow in a healthy way, perhaps adding Miracle Gro.
We want the weeds to be identified and removed, sometimes they're prickly.
We want our flowers to give us joy and happiness so we spend time with them.
We want the weeds to be pulled out to make room for more flowers so that all those colors nourish our soul.
For me, I'm adding flowers but I'm being choosy. I want flowers I can easily incorporate into my garden. I want flowers that will not take over the garden. I want flowers that can be independent and flourish with some tender loving care.
Good soil, regular watering and bending over to pull weeds.
That's what makes a flower (and a tomato) grow.
