Weed

Weed: A weed in a general sense is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-made settings such as gardens, lawns or agricultural areas, but also in parks, woods and other natural areas. More specifically, the term is often used to describe native or nonnative plants that grow and reproduce aggressively.^[1] Generally, a weed is a plant in an undesired place. (Wikipedia)

I just spent the past hour and a half pulling weeds in my “garden.” Considering that there are more weeds than dirt… I really need to ask myself if I’m up for the task. Allergies aside, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I have never particularly liked dirt or getting dirty and who knows what manner of godforsaken critters might be out there crawling under all that crap I’m digging through. Yep. I said, “crap.” To my more sensitive readers, I apologize, but I’m at a loss to find a word to sum up the true state of my front door “garden area.” Since it’s the first thing that you see when you come to my house, I can’t very well leave it that way and if I don’t deal with it now it’s going to be a jungle in a month.  Where are the producers for “Curb Appeal” when I need them?

Before I drag this post out (I mean, seriously, what can you say about weeds that requires lots of detail??), I’m giving myself a limit. I’ve got three more paragraphs to get to my point or I end this post mid-sentence. I mean, after all, what can I saw about weeds that has to do with anything? Everything actually. In my quest to get married, I often looked at my less than stellar mental health and even less savory character and wondered where was I when God was handing out all the admirable character traits. As the years have progressed, I’ve noted more favorable personality traits in cropping up in me, but there are still a fair number of traits that I’d trade my buck teeth to get rid of. Why does God let that stuff remain? I’m done waiting for him to work a mojo on me… but I still don’t get it.  That’s where the weeds started to speak to me.

In the whole big scheme of my life I am going to have good and bad traits. Jesus doesn’t like the bad ones any more than I do, but he knows that he can’t just go yanking out all the negative bits all at once. In my garden, I looked at some of the newer weeds. They were so easy to pull I didn’t need more than my thumb and forefinger. There were other, older weeds, that I needed to use my little shovel. By the time I got to the big weeds… the mature weeds that were fully entrenched and not giving up without a fight… I had to pull out the hammer. I kid you not. I attacked the weeds with a hammer. In the absence of other, more appropriate, tools you use what you have. Realistically speaking, I was not going to get rid of every weed in my garden today. I’m not even going to get them all the next time or the time after that. There are always going to be unwanted weeds popping up in my garden that I have to address.

My tendency to worry and doubt, my surliness and anger issues, and my selfishness are like those weeds. God has had to use various tools to dislodge those things from my life and has to continually deal with them because, like weeds, they keep popping up when and where I least want them. My fear is a more mature weed. God uses unlikely tools like cane spiders and centipedes to route these weeds. My addiction to porn and the remnants of my sexual addiction? Those are extremely mature weeds with roots that are thick and go deep back into my childhood. It took major force to get rid of the porn in my life and the roots of my sexual addiction still go pretty deep. But God, the Ultimate Gardener, is no more content to leave those weeds there than I am. That he will deal with them over the entire course of my life doesn’t surprise me. I’m a work in progress just as my garden is a work in progress. He’s going to continue to pull the weeds in my life until my life brings him more and more glory. I’m going to keep pulling weeds until my curb actually has some appeal.

Of course, Hysterectomy Girl is going to have a really sore and swollen abdomen tomorrow and is going to regret having done all that weeding, but as the ruling personality of all my altered egos, Bipolar Girl is very happy to have the visual. Does this count as a modern day parable? I wonder.