Weeding With Perseverance
I was watering my wildflower/weed garden. As always happens when I am out in nature, random thoughts flitted through my mind. While the water nourished the weeds and the flowers, the Bible verse, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust” came to mind. It was not possible to soak one without the other benefitting as well. And, as I explained a few days before to Tom, the initiator of Tri-State Creation Care, early on I risked losing the fragile flowering plants if I pulled the weeds too soon.
That realization made me think of a second Bible verse that explains that, at the harvest, God will separate the chaff from the wheat. Although I did not plan to wait too long before weeding, I knew patience and care were necessary to remove the annoyances without disturbing the intended outcome. The more I pondered those weeds, the more they resembled my faults – always popping up at inopportune moments and always in need of eradication.
While negative events are random at times, honest introspection might help us realize that many of our personal problems or our world’s messes are results of our own determination to do things our way instead of living by God’s rules. Read the stories in the Old and New Testaments. Mankind repeatedly turns its back on God’s commandments; and inevitably, heartache or disaster follows. Even Solomon and David, known for their wisdom and power, grew too sure of their own judgment and independence; and look at the results! Similar to weeds that inevitably appear, all of us are regularly blind to our faults, which often create unhappy situations in our lives.
Like a garden that needs constant tending to produce its fruits, we need God’s daily assistance to live joyful, productive lives. Given a few weeks of neglect, a garden quickly transforms to a forlorn state. The same happens to our souls without daily prayer, the Mass and the Eucharist. However, if we seek assistance from the Holy Spirit, we become aware of the “weeds” in our own lives and can ask God to aid us in diminishing them. Eliminating weeds and faults is a forever battle.
When I was a child, I sometimes quit a game if I foresaw the possibility that I might lose or perform poorly. My pride interfered. I wanted what I wanted without the effort or practice it took to achieve success. At times, I see the same reaction in my grandchildren – disappointed because they lost, or hurt because a present or an occasion did not measure up to their expectations. Fortunately, following the example of our parents, my husband and I learned early that experiencing normal disappointment and displeasure is not necessarily harmful to a child.
In fact, allowing children to work through disappointments without rescuing them with a treat, a participation trophy or an excuse actually helps them adjust successfully in their adult lives. The lessons equip them with the perseverance, patience and humility necessary to handle an often-harsh and uncaring world. God, by allowing us our free will, knows that as imperfect human beings, our missteps are inevitable and humbling. A wise parent, He uses our trials to draw us closer to Him and to grow in our faith if we acknowledge our dependency on His mercy and love.
Life is a combination of flowers and weeds – wonderful, difficult and certainly unpredictable. How do we navigate the troubles of life and teach our children to do the same? St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s answer was that we need to be patient, admit our faults and seek God’s grace in prayer to remedy them. With God’s love and aid, we are able to recognize the negative traits that rob us of life’s beauty and replace them with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which brings us peace and joy.
Blessed Solanus Casey said, “Were we only to correspond to God’s graces continually being showered down on every one of us, we would be able to pass from being great sinners one day to being great saints the next.” Let us persevere in our weeding, while allowing God to be the Master Gardener.
