It was two years ago that I first noticed the lacy foliage poking up from behind a patch of cerastium in my garden. The leaves looked like a type of mum, so my initial thought was, "Oh, goody! My fall color is finally spreading!"
I pulled a few stray clover shoots from around its roots and tucked some mulch up under it, patted it on the head, and went off humming.
A few more leaves appeared during the season in various places--some of them nowhere near my mums and all of them a little lighter shade of green. I left them alone but a tiny doubt began to form in my mind.
**Mums don't send up suckers three feet from the mother plant, do they? Or do they? Maybe I just never noticed. It sure looks like a mum. Hmmm.**
The fall was busy and I forgot to check for flowers on the new plants.
The next year there were many more lacy leaves up and around the mums, in the lilies, in the lawn. I still thought they might be real plants--maybe a ground cover I had grabbed from the "dead and dying" racks at the nursery where I like to shop.
Anyway they were a pretty light green, softly curling at the edges--like intricately patterned cut-work lace laid out over the dark ground. It just didn't have a weed-ish expression. It was dainty and demure.
Beautiful.
I pulled a few of the ones that had nested into my more established plants, but mostly I left them alone and focused my attack on leggy crabgrass, squat clover patches, and leering dandelions.
For a second year in a row, the "mums" failed to bloom in the fall.
Year three: the faker has taken over the entire flower bed.
Deep in the ground between every one of its innocently waving leaves is a tangled web of thick, brittle runners fanning out like the spokes of a wheel--fat, white fingerlings twisting their way among the roots of my cherished perennials, strangling the life out of the smaller ones, burrowing into the heart of the larger ones, sucking water and nutrients away from the rightful occupants of my garden.
Well.
Hell hath no fury like a gardener duped (I think that's how the saying goes), so this spring I ripped into the impostor with a holy vengeance. I pulled it up until my fingers would barely close. I attacked it with Round-Up. I chopped it out with hoes and shovels. I lay on my stomach and gently, gently threaded it's fat, ugly roots out from among my iris rhizomes. I overlooked large patches of quack grass and sow thistle so I could devote more time to the eradication of THIS, the most evil and virulent of all garden foes...wait, what?
Yes, friends, it is true. I actually walked past sneering blobs of clover without bending down. I turned a blind eye to the wild carrot patch in the middle of my campanula.
In my fervor to conquer one horticultural enemy, I gave a pass to all the others.
Not a great strategy for gardening, or for life, as God reminded me with a wink as I lay in a thriving patch of pigweed, obsessively attempting to extricate one last mystery root from the belly of a purple cone flower.
When I have had my eyes opened to an area of weediness or sin in myself, I want it out! I have a deep desire to cultivate the garden of faith I have been given. I want to tend it well because I love God and I am His steward. I want it to bear fruit to please Him because I love Him. Sin gets in the way of that, and so I am vigilant--hopefully not out of legalism or pride, but out of passionate love for my Savior.
Some of the weeds I know well because I have fought them for years. They are relentless, and because I recognize them, so am I.
But sometimes sin shows up in party clothes. It flounces up all prettified and dainty, and does a spot-on impression of virtue.
And I nurture it for a while. I water it, and weed around it, and even show it off a little with a layer of mulch and a visible spot at the front of the flower bed.
But like a weed, sin never stays where it is planted. It creeps and sneaks underground and winds and tangles its way into every part of the spiritual landscape.
And after a while it starts to strangle and kill off all that is truly beautiful and useful.
A little bit later we wake with a start and realize that everything we have worked so hard for is in danger, and our love for that deceitful little impostor immediately becomes a consuming hatred.
This is good! No successful battle was ever fought with apathy and indifference, but the temptation is to become so focused on the eradication of the big invader that we open the back door to the familiar horde of little, "lesser" ones.
All weeds are bad. All sin must be yanked up and thrown out.
A mountain lion might seem less scary when you compare it to a T-rex, but both of them would gladly eat you.
Same with sin.
So, this is spiritual lesson 1,427 from my garden.
It has not helped me win the battle against my mystery invader (I'm saving up for a flame thrower), but I hope I am more sensitive to the importance of identifying and removing both the physical and the spiritual weeds from my life in a timely fashion.
Take if to heart if you find it useful. If not, add it to the compost pile;)
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