Weed Your Life

This week on my day off work I agreed to help mum with some weeding in her garden.  I started out with the peas which were pretty overgrown, and the weeds were intertwined with the plants.  I'll confess there were a few pea plant casualties.  It reminded me of the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt 13:24-30, 36-43), where the man tells his servants to let the wheat (good stuff) and tares (bad stuff) to grow together because if they tried to remove the tares they might up-root the wheat also.  Not sure how this applies to the peas, but perhaps I'll take it a little slower next time.

Next I decided to tackle the strawberries.  Here's a little glimpse of how the strawberries were going.  

Mum has quite a large patch of strawberry plants, the benefits of which I have been enjoying for years.  But this year they've been left a little worse for wear.  With such a big patch and so many weeds, I wondered what kind of approach to take.  I decided that rather than trying to do a quick job over the whole large area, to instead start in one spot near the edge and work very thoroughly on that spot.  I might not get much done, but at least I know that my little cleared patch would produce good strawberries in the summer.  

So with this approach in mind I began the weeding, pulling out every little blade of grass, as well as the dead bits of the strawberry plants.  This brought a few more thoughts to my mind.  If I were to leave the dead parts on there, the rest of the plant would probably still grow fine, but by removing the bad parts it removes something which could stop the rest of the plant reaching it's full potential.  Like pruning, when we remove a bad or unnecessary part of a plant it means that it will no longer be hoarding the water or important nutrients that the rest of the plant needs.  Instead, the rest of the plant can grow larger and stronger, and produce more fruit.  Like our lives, we sometimes allow a few bad things to hang on.  It might be a bad habit or a guilty pleasure of which we don't want to let go, or it could be movies or music we have which contain some vulgarity, swearing, or immorality which effect us a little more each time.  Yet if we weed that out of our lives, the quality of the rest of our life improves and we are much more equipped to reach our full potential for happiness.

There's an audio talk by a great guy called John Bytheway, "Weed Your Brain; Grow Your Testimony," which compares the principles of gardening and weeding to our spiritual lives.  I think next time I do some weeding I'll take my iPod and listen to it again.  Oh, and in case you're wondering how I went, here's the result of mum's and my efforts (keeping in mind there's a few other plants down this end of the patch).  Not bad, huh?  Still a bit more work to do though.