In the Garden

Such a hymn came to mind a few days ago as I was doing some weeding and landscaping work. I had decided that this particular work would be a great “mindless” opportunity to pray or listen to God, two tasks which are hard to do for a person who often has busy thoughts and a busy life like myself! I lasted all of two minutes before I forgot my plan and became too engrossed in the intricacies of removing rampant quackgrass from grass-like chive plants beside some vigorous lilies.

It was then, as I was pulling the quackgrass and its insidious rhizomes (underground roots that enable rapid spread), that I had some sudden realizations. In my love for analogies and for turning the most practical, material activity into a metaphysical, abstract reflection, I immediately connected those realizations to life and to Holy Scripture.

You see, quackgrass plants are essentially invasive to the garden world. They spread beneath the surface through their rhizomes, unseen, and if you leave a chunk of rhizome while weeding, you will inevitably see the grass shoots rise up again. Quackgrass grasses are surprisingly difficult to yank up, since pulling up an innocuous-looking single shoot may bring up a three-foot-long rhizome and other shoots along with it.

Right next to this particular quackgrass colony lived a huge growth of lilies; they probably occupied two-thirds of the garden bed on which I was working. These lilies were so populous and eager to spread that lily shoots were poking out of cracks in the wooden bed dividers, sneaking beneath the edges of the wood boards, and even bursting up from the lawn in a few spots. These lilies had begun as separate, orderly plants at one point and had voraciously overtaken the bed year by year, such that you could not tell where one plant began and one ended anymore, nor constrain them and their exuberance. My digging around in the mulch, aimed at removing various weeds, revealed that lilies propagate in a connected fashion similarly to how the quackgrass spread, with one plant dividing and budding and initiating others.

Although the quackgrasses had dominated the more-barren third of the bed, they were almost absent from the lily section. It seemed that the lilies outcompeted the quackgrass, steadily expanding in their extent despite the opposition of the invading species. Sure, the quackgrass spread all over by its rhizomes, but so did the lilies! The two species of plant were not so different after all, it appeared. They merely aroused different emotions in their gardener.

As a matter of fact, four connections, analogies, or conclusions from these observations came to my mind:

• There is not a huge difference in defining “good” versus “evil,” except in the eyes of the gardener or Gardener, if we want to call God a “Gardener.” Said another way, it does not take much for a plant to be deemed good or evil, just as there is not much actually that a man must do to pass from death to life in becoming a Christian. We reject quackgrass as laudable plant using our judgment, yet the lilies behave quite alike to it. All it would take is for us to decide “quackgrass is good” and it would be so. God is also Judge and can impute righteousness and goodness to sinners. If you think about it, a new, baptized Christian still has his same body and lives in the same world as before, but he is different within and answers to a different Person (God). We sin after being Christian, but we are not only sinners, but rather possess an identity elsewhere. Because of this, we should never despise still-fallen brothers and sisters, for we were once as they are and are still quite close to them, except in the small but significant way that counts: God is in us and has chosen us.

• Just as much of the “battle” between the lilies and the quackgrass takes place underground, so, too, is there much of the world and the Life beyond that is yet unknown to us. What we see in our everyday lives is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of God’s all-encompassing plan and Providence. Battles go on behind the scenes or “beneath the scenes,” ready to pop up with visible evidence at some point, in the right time. Not everything is as it seems at first glance.

• Good can overcome evil if it is cultivated well, which is to say, if it has a good Gardener. We are the little plants—the lilies and the chive grasses and the raspberry plants of the bed I weeded—and God prunes and removes the weeds, dead growth, and brush from around us as He wishes. The lilies can do something in their quest against the quackgrass, growing in their natural way as they were created, but as my efforts showed a few days ago, sometimes they need some outside help! If we as Christians are seeking to do everything on our own, we will find everything as painstaking as my attempts to separate chives from grass efficiently. God, though, knows what He is doing and must exercise His judgment and prune us as He sees fit.

I could likely expand upon all of these points, but I do not desire, nor pretend, to preach a mini-sermon. Rather, I will purposely leave these thoughts as they are and encourage you, my readers, to dive into Scripture and ensure that I am not wholly crazy in my analogies and assertions. Go and reflect on what you can learn from Nature and from the Creation around you, grounded and double-checked in Truth beyond my musings.

Indeed, perhaps most of these observations are fairly obvious to the average Scripture-reading Christian. Why, perhaps some of them are stretched a little. Perhaps, even, they are rather ordinary and boring; really, Shelby, you think about plants and Christians and come to far-flung analogies about them while weeding with your hands in the dirt? All I know is that I was struck by these four points all at once today while I was

in the garden.