Posted in The Christian Life

I finally made an attempt to get outside today and get something done out in the sun. My intention was to prune the roses; they'd been left to their own devices all summer, and had run out of places to sprout new buds. So I turned up the tunes while dd was doing her math, opened the window so I could hear it, and headed out with clippers in hand.

Half an hour and one rose bush later, I noticed the morning glory blooms reaching up above the flax -- quite a feat in my crazy flowerbeds. So I abandoned the two climbing roses in favor of saving my gardens from being strangled.

I cleaned out three flowerbeds before I wandered over to the herb garden. Already, I had fed two armloads of the vicious vine to the chickens, and the heat was getting to me. But my poor herbs were all bent over and tangled together. So, despite the screaming coming from my hamstrings, I tackled the neglected patch.

This herb bed was a dream of mine back when I married my darling husband. He's a chef and I'm definitely lacking in the cooking department, so I was trying to find a way I could contribute in the kitchen. I had drawn up multiple plans for herb beds, everything from traditional English knot gardens to postage-stamp plots around a hoped-for mailbox, but as yet, I hadn't had a mailbox, let alone a piece of dirt to plant in.

When we moved into this house a decade ago, it was a faded, old mobile home set in a forest of what I call "spider trees" -- those evergreen shrubs that attract every little bug in the desert. We tore out the shrubs, moved away for three years, and then moved back in with a small child in tow. Now we had bare ground and a poorly planted lawn; I wanted something fantastic to come out of the humiliation of being an architect in a trailer.

The west end of the house faced the pasture, the railroad tracks, the road and the beautiful Beezley Hills -- all the things that kept us entertained, but it also bordered the driveway. It wasn't a place we'd go to sit and watch the sunset, and other than my small (at the time) white rose bush, I didn't have anything I could put there that I would venture out to care for.

My solution to this was to plant herbs there. I figured that there wasn't enough exhaust and pollution there to worry about killing them or making them unhealthy for us, but they'd also have plenty of sun. They'd be close to the house in the cold winter months. Best of all, I'd have a reason to go take care of them, seeing how I was going to provide my husband with the choicest herbs for his culinary creations.

I planted three flavors of thyme, two of oregano, my hubby's sage plant from his mother's house, a few chives, and a handful of strawberries. That was six years ago. Now the tarragon is overrunning the old sage and the rose bush, the remaining Greek oregano has filled out the rest of that half of the bed, two thymes remain and have edged out the strawberries, peas, and second sage, and the two types of chives are being taken out by the mint that managed to sneak its way in. The rosemary never survives the winter, and the lemon balm hasn't yet taken hold.

I love this herb bed. It has a wild mind of its own, and besides the mint bed, it's the only area of the yard that I'm particularly proud of. No matter how seldom I actually weed it, I always wander back into the house dreaming of pasta and baked potatoes and summer and purple flowers covered in honeybees.

Today, though, I was angry. These horrible weeds had taken over my precious herb bed in my absence, and were destroying my sweet plants. Another armload of morning glory over the pasture fence and I was ready to give up, but compassion overwhelmed me and I dove back in, cursing the green invaders.

Suddenly God began to speak to me. It was the story of the harvest that was infested with weeds, but the workers were told to leave the tares until harvest time, when they would be separated at last from the good grain. I was having such a hard time finding the roots to these vines that I was pulling out beautiful oregano and thyme along with them. Every time I grabbed for vine roots, I also got herb roots.

At that moment, I understood God's heart. I know a young lady who's straying from Him -- more than one actually, and this applies to all of them. I've tried to counsel them, to help them, to explain God's heart, to warn them from my own experiences why the path they're on is so dangerous, all to no avail. And my heart breaks, but more out of knowing the hard road they have ahead of them than out of truly understanding the heart of God.

Today the Master Gardener was telling me to leave it to Him. He was saying that He'll deal both with the crushed plants and the evil weeds. He's the gardener and I'm just the hired hand. He knows how best to deal with them, because He loves them. I love my little (big?) plants because I planted and raised them; He loves us because He created us! He's angered when the weeds come in and strangle His precious children, and He knows which are weeds and which are just happy invaders who mean no harm. He can care for the wounded and strangled ones, without damaging or uprooting them in the process.

As the Gardener's helper, I need to hold up the wounded ones until He steps in to deal with the problem, and prayer is the best beanpole I know.

Matt 13:1-5