Gardening 101

I spent almost 4 hours yesterday doing yard work. Pulling weeds, raking dirt, getting sunburned, stabbing myself unintentionally with sticks, stuffing trashbags, laying mulch, picking up dog poop, and crouching under a trampoline.

I'm ridiculously sore-- not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing-- but it definitely wiped me out. I'm still learning the whole: you're 6,000 feet closer to the sun so you NEED sunscreen and NEED to drink more water. My back is a nice shade of hot pink and my hands have some lovely blood blisters and splinters to go with that.

But as I was cutting and pulling and getting covered in dirt, I learned something about pulling weeds and doing yard work:

It's necessary.

In order to make way for something better, you first have to cut away that which kills. In this case, weeds. It would be useless to plant gorgeous arrays of pink and red rose bushes and bright yellow daffodils right on the same soil running rampant with thorny weeds and dry, dead brush. It wouldn't grow. It might last a day or two, but eventually it will just get eaten up by the weeds around it and die off-- letting the weeds grow bigger.

Yet so often we do this with our hearts.

Hoping if we can just plant a few beautiful things amongst the garbage, it will somehow outweigh all the sin and destruction we have let grow rampant for far too long.

But it doesn't work that way. The weeds WILL eventually outgrow the flowers. Because you need an entirely new root-- out with the old and in with the new.

We must do a complete de-weeding of our hearts if we want any kind of lasting beauty and life to grow.

I think it's extremely difficult for us to realize just how much our garbage is killing us until we try and plant life there too. It's SO easy to let your backyard grow weed after weed, and just grow numb to the sight of it. Because taking all that out would require a lot of work, and a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of energy.

Decluttering is painful, dirty, difficult, and time-consuming. That's why so many of us ignore it and don't do it. BUT, it's beyond rewarding, and so so worth it. It may not appear like much is changing during the sweaty and exhausting process of getting rid of all that garbage, but once you're done, you'll look back at all you've accomplished and see the start of life.

Quite often, we may not even recognize a weed as a weed. So many times yesterday I couldn't tell if what I was yanking at was a weed or a tree, because it had gotten THAT big... it even had some pretty green leaves... but those kinds of weeds are the most dangerous because they are disguised as life, but end up killing more than any of the others. Some death in your heart might appear as life. Because it's pretty on the outside and even makes you happy-- but in the end, it will still accomplish it's overall purpose: to destroy you.

It's a process; just like growing new life requires water and sunlight and time... making way for that life requires sweat, a couple of burns a long the way, and time.

Will it cut you up and cause you pain? Absolutely. You're ripping out death and destruction with strong roots that go down deep. Some deeper than others. But I would much rather work hard at ripping out the death in me than letting it eventually kill me.

I promise the life that will come from ripping away that death will make you wonder why you didn't do it a long, long time ago.

Let's plant some life :)

-Han