How Does Your Garden Grow?

          The Lord will vindicate me; your love, Lord, endures forever— do not abandon the works of your hands. (Psalm 138:8)

This is toward the end of a praise song written by David. The Lord will vindicate me. How positive. Your love, Lord, endures forever. Even more positive. Do not abandon the works of your hands. Not so positive. And David was called “a man after God’s own heart.” This going back-and-forth is normal for David’s songs. It’s one of the things I love about David’s psalms. He reflects. He rages. He whines. He despairs. He rejoices. The psalms are where I learned that God could handle my anger and other negative emotions. David didn’t protect God from David. So when David’s emotional life got messy, he took it to God, not bemoaning what a horrible person he was for feeling what he felt, but both celebrating that God would act on his behalf and questioning, accusing, complaining, and mourning that God was not acting on his behalf.

Yesterday, I spent a few minutes pulling weeds from around one of my garden beds. I remembered, as I often do when I weed, my father’s criticism because I have never managed to have a weed-free garden. Weeds eat the food of what we’re trying to grow, and I probably should get rid of the garden and let grass grow to the foundation of the house if I’m not going to be out there taking care.

Then there were the well-meaning churchy uses of the gardening metaphor that associate weeds with sin. Of course, I took it to heart in the other direction. Weeds became a sign of failure. And then I began learning a little about some of those weeds, and discovered that some of them are better for you and more useful than the healthy vegetables you work so hard to grow, and are so easy to grow that you have to work hard to keep from doing so.

Two other things I’ve learned about weeding are that it is much easier to remove weeds with the right tools, and easier when they’ve gotten big enough to grab. But the key lesson from yesterday is that there are going to be weeds. The only ways to keep there from being weeds are expensive and potentially harmful to your garden. Wasting emotional energy kicking yourself because your garden has weeds is unproductive. Maybe other people’s gardens can be weedless, but it’s clear that mine cannot – though mulch would help and the plants are mostly sufficiently grown to be mulched around, so maybe.

Similarly, when weeds come up in my spiritual “garden,” it’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign that there’s work to do. And the Master Gardener will direct the work if we’re not screaming, “Weed! There’s a weed! Oh what a horrible failure I am!” so loudly we can’t hear Him.