A Quote by Diane Dreher
Gardening can become a spiritual exercise, teaching us discernment as we eliminate the weeds from our lives, giving what we value room to grow.
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Generations of women have sacrificed their lives to become their mothers. But we do not have that luxury any more. The world has changed too much to let us have the lives our mothers had. And we can no longer afford the guilt we feel at not being our mothers. We cannot afford any guilt that pulls us back to the past. We have to grow up, whether we want to or not. We have to stop blaming men and mothers and seize every second of our lives with passion. We can no longer afford to waste our creativity. We cannot afford spiritual laziness.
So it is with life. Those thorns, the prickly problems of life, cause us to strive to rise above them and then, as we do, we learn. We learn to exercise true compassion, true kindness - or the thorns, if we let them, cause us to brood, to mourn over our trials. Then we plant the seeds of bitterness, hate, and ruin - weeds. We may reach up for the rose or down to the weeds...the weeds in life that tangle us, strangle us, and cause us to lose hope.
Conscience is all about using discernment, discrimination and assessment, rather than looking to the rather crude form of advice from the judge that's mostly attacking our sense of worth or value, instead of giving us helpful information.
Giving is like a muscle. To be strong, you have to exercise it, and to grow as a person, giving is the exercise. You can't really enjoy anything without sharing it.
Throughout our lives, God's grace bestows temporal blessings and spiritual gifts that magnify our abilities and enrich our lives. His grace refines us. His grace helps us become our best selves.
We don't have to feel negative about weeds. They're a part of life. We need to see them, acknowledge them, focus on the solution, and immediately do whatever it takes to eliminate their influence from our lives.
“When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” Focusing on serving our brothers and sisters can guide us to make divine decisions in our daily lives and prepares us to value and love what the Lord loves. In so doing, we witness by our very lives that we are His disciples. When we are engaged in His work, we feel His Spirit with us. We grow in testimony, faith, trust, and love.
In giving us children, God places us in a position of both leadership and service. He calls us to give up our lives for someone else's sake - to abandon our own desires and put our child's interests first. Yet, according to His perfect design, it is through this selflessness that we can become truly fulfilled.
We grow because the clamorous, permanent presence of our children forces us to put their needs before ours. We grow because our love for our children urges us to change as nothing else in our lives has the power to do. We grow (if we're willing to grow, that is: not every parent is willing) because being a parent helps us stop being a child.
God uses suffering to purge sin from our lives, strengthen our commitment to Him, force us to depend on grace, bind us together with other believers, produce discernment, foster sensitivity, discipline our minds, spend our time wisely, stretch our hope, cause us to know Christ better, make us long for truth, lead us to repentance of sin, teach us to give thanks in time of sorrow, increase faith, and strengthen character.
There is a theology to gardening that few of us consider, but to understand this theology means relinquishing much control - our arsenal of books, techniques, tools, chemicals, fertilizers, fancy hybrids, and expectations. Yet, that is exactly what we must do if we are to fully embrace a more spiritual form of gardening. As a part of Nature we must learn to enter our garden as if it were truly sacred, we must learn to enter with humility.
I don't like weeds! My father made me mow weeds and cut weeds when I was a kid. I've hated weeds ever since I was 12 years old. I'll never go in the weeds! I'll never gonna take you in the weeds.
People who spend a great deal of time in their gardens attest to the natural mindfulness that gardening requires. What could be more naturally mindful than weeding? It requires a great deal of sustained attention. Weeds need to be taken up with care: Pull too hard, and the weed breaks in your fingers, leaving the root to grow and spread. Different weeds need different techniques and, sometimes, tools. When we weed our gardens, we have to pay attention to where and how we walk and bend. Move too far in one direction or another, and we'll squash growing things.
I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.
He was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.
People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don't challenge ourselves, nature has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles, and human nature has shown us that we only value the things we struggle to achieve.
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