Lessons From the Garden

This morning, I walked around with my garden shears, deadheading rosebushes.  Some plants easily drop their spent flowers -- these are called "self-cleaning" plants.  Others, however, hold onto their old blossoms and refuse to turn loose of them, until they form a fruit.  In the case of roses, the "fruit" is rose-hips, a fruit that can be harvested for various uses -- but not by me.  I don't know what to do with rose-hips, and that's not why I grow roses. 

If I allow the rosebushes to continue feeding the old flowers until they produce fruit, they will continue to put their energy into the rose-hips instead of into producing new flowers.  Soon, I will have bushes with no roses, only rose-hips.  I think our lives are like that.  If we put our energy into "feeding" the past, going over and over what was wrong, what others did to us, we cannot produce flowers for today.  We have formed in our brains what is called a "loop," a phenomenon that makes every current event connect to and feed into the past.  Soon, our lives are filled with "rose-hips," which cannot be used for today -- unless, of course, we are scientists who know how to extract Vitamin C from them.

I recently read a story about a young woman who had been abused by her grandfather.  When he died, he left her his house, "where they had shared so many memories," as he put it in his will.  Her rage and bitterness were unspeakable.  She hated that house, and she hated him.  One day, she had the idea to donate the house to an organization that sheltered abused women and children.  In one stroke, she rid herself of the hateful house, and somehow, she found a way to make roses bloom from the same bush.

One of the lessons I've learned from working in the garden is that simply weeding a bed will not work unless we plant something in that spot that we want to grow.  The same is true of bitter memories:  we cannot get rid of them by denying them; we must plant something else in their place -- something strong enough to create new growth in our brains to replace the "loop" of past history.

For me, that "strong growth" has been Scripture.  Isaiah 59:19 says, "When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will put him to flight."  Sometimes, the hurts of the past come at us like a flood, threatening to overwhelm our stability and drown us.  But, if we have stored up Scripture in our hearts and minds, the Spirit of the Lord will put a sword in our hands, one that will counteract fear, anxiety, hatred, -- all the emotions that threaten to destroy our souls.

The morning I found out I had lung cancer, on the way to the doctor's office, I had been listening to Charles Stanley teaching about how to handle a crisis.  His text was Psalm 57:1:  I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.  What a great gift that teaching was to me -- even before I knew I needed it, the Holy Spirit had ministered it to my heart like a shield and a sword to defeat the enemy I would face that day.

We cannot keep feeding yesterday's flowers; their blooms are spent.  If we want flowers for today, we must be willing to cut off the parts of our past that drain our energy.  If we don't want to keep staring at weeds in our yard, it is time to begin planting the Word of God instead.