Seeds, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Be who you are!

I have never bought a potted ‘weed’ plant in the nurseries, but sometimes when I look in my garden, one would think that I did. Those crazy things come up willy-nilly! Yet, the flowers I buy need all kinds of attention to make them grow the way they should!

Our lives are the same way. Our life’s garden has beautiful flowers and some that may need to be thinned. Then there are those unsightly weeds, some downright stubborn ones too. We all have good in our lives, but sometimes it is hard to see the good through all the weeds. It is a daily process, and sometimes we go weeks, months, and even years before we decide to get rid of the weeds. The longer we wait, the bigger and more stubborn those weeds get.

We have a Master Gardener that loves to help us weed our garden and His desire is to bring out all the beautiful things in our lives He planned for us long ago. There isn’t a garden bad enough that He cannot create into a masterpiece.

This has been my motivation for writing this book. So many things crop up in life (no pun intended!) and we are left wondering what to do with them. Life circumstances that we have no control over, yet every day, the same set of circumstances are still there staring at us. Not fun. I am a very visual person, so as I began to pray about the circumstances in my life, God revealed to me how our lives are a garden; Not only our garden but His garden, if we let Him help us do the gardening.

I want you to take a close look at the cover of this book. You will notice that there are some beautiful flowers, in fact one of my favorites, sunflowers! Did you happen to notice the weeds in the bouquet? There are some fluffy white seeded dandelions just waiting to reproduce wherever they land. Also, in the bouquet are some beautiful, yet nasty Canadian Thistle. I’m pretty sure my neighbors thought ‘that crazy neighbor lady has lost her last marble’ as I cut down the biggest, gnarliest Canadian Thistle I could find. (Yes, I let a Canadian Thistle bloom just for you so you could visualize how pretty weeds can be.) I proceeded to put it in a large vase in my backyard with my other ‘weeds’ and sunflowers and took picture after picture until I got the one I wanted. The picture on the front cover and the title of this book represents my life, your life, and the lives of everyone all around us. We’ve all got good flowers and we’ve all got weeds.

It’s so easy to focus only on the bad things in our life, instead of what is good. Sometimes we can only see the bad things in others, and that can be very frustrating. Or, sometimes we are envious of the good in others only to become jealous. That is a weed, the weed of comparison. Either way, we want to learn how to appreciate our own beauty as well as the beauty in others, and not focus on the weeds.

After I took the pictures and the title was in place, I saved the picture onto my phone’s wallpaper as a reminder to ‘finish the book’ every time I looked at my phone. (I think I may be the world’s greatest procrastinator!) I couldn’t fit the whole picture with the flowers and the words on my phone, so I just centered it, getting a little bit of both. The next time I ‘woke up’ my phone, I couldn’t believe what I saw. My eyes welled up with tears … God had truly given me the message for the book after I felt it was mostly written. What I saw in the partially revealed title of ‘Seeds, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ … was this …. See the Good. It still overwhelms me. That is exactly what God sees when He looks at my life’s garden, and it is what He sees when He looks at yours. It is what we are to see when we not only look at our own garden, but at other’s as well. We are to See the Good.

When Adam and Eve left the garden, that’s when the weeds showed up. All through the Bible we read about how people tended their gardens, what they let grow and the outcome of their choices. Fast forward to today, this very minute you are reading this; How are you tending your garden? We all deal with the weeds in our garden, but that is not what God sees when He looks at you.

Through writing this, I have been able to identify the weeds in my life, and believe me, do I have weeds to pull! The good news is, weeds are normal. No big surprise there. Stuff comes up that I didn’t plant. Some things are easy to get rid of and others require some serious effort. In fact, it would be easier just to walk away from the ugly weed, but they all must go. I have also learned how to focus on the things that God has put inside me. The beauty just waiting to come out and blossom and thrive … the things He intended for me long ago. I am also learning that every garden grows better with manure … and we all know what manure really is. But as God would have it, gardens do better with manure. Period. Life delivers us a lot of manure too. I think there is a bumper sticker about it even …. ‘Manure Happens’. It looks different to all of us and can come in many different forms… loss of a job, loss of a loved one, divorce, illness, anxiety, rejection, depression, failure. Yet, if we allow our Master Gardener to cultivate the manure into our life, He will bring out intense beauty that otherwise would have never been. As we allow Him to work in our lives, we will eventually look forward to trials knowing that something beautiful will be on the other side of it.

So on this journey of ‘Seeds, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’, I want to share with you what God has taught me about cultivating ‘my garden’, and I hope it will help you cultivate yours too!