Pulling Weeds in Life

When my kids were tiny, I started a garden with the ambition to tackle just one simple thing: Strawberries.  Over the years as I added, took away and experimented, my goal remained the same – to get my kids to love eating fresh, organic, healthy food.  Having kids and being mindful of what they are eating is what made me want to garden in the first place.  What better way to help my kids fall in love with healthy food then to get it straight from a garden in their own yard?  The result is garden to table, or in my kid’s case garden to mouth.

But gardening isn’t all just consuming delicious produce, it requires work to prepare the soil, work to plant the seeds and then work to water and weed so that we can get a tasty harvest.  Today, as I was working in my garden, I saw a clear parallel to gardening and life.  When we are caring for our relationships like our marriage, our kids, family and friends we often reap the benefits.  Yet more often than not, I find weeds creeping in, weeds like selfishness, bad attitudes, discontentment.  These weeds if allowed to continue to grow, multiply at a rapid rate and what was once a small problem is now going to require a lot of work to uproot.  I believe the goal of our relationships should be the same; fresh, organic, and healthy, but unlike the garden we often focus on the weeds in our husbands or kids garden before tending to our own overgrowth.  So how do we focus on our own weeds?

How do I start weeding my life?

First, we need to identify the weeds.

Weeds can be tricky.  Some weeds look just like flowers and are often picked and put into a beautiful bouquet by my daughter.  They look pretty, so what’s the difference?  Those flowers that are weeds will eventually take over the garden and choke out the good plants, the vegetables and fruit that we are trying to grow.  The same is true in ourselves.  If we take a really close look at ourselves and we’re honest, we too have weeds that need to be pulled so they don’t hurt the ones we care about most.

If you’re thinking what do weeds look like, they most often look like the things that unintentionally hurt us and/or the ones we love the most.  The most common weeds in this entrepreneurial life I believe are ones like discontentment due to comparison of our businesses, material possessions, outside appearance.. you get the idea.  They often result in bad attitudes, which when let creep into our gardens, take us away from a life of thriving.

To find out what my weeds are, I turn to God in prayer.  He is so loving and gentle in showing me the weeds that need to be pulled in my life.  If you don’t want to pray, another great way to identify your weeds is to ask or just listen to what your mom and your kids say.  They tend to be quite honest (but notice I didn’t say husbands).

How do I get those darn weeds out?

Once you can see them, I encourage you to just start by picking one weed, an easy one, that you want to get rid of.  Maybe that weed is your phone getting more attention than your kids, so you set a time each day to put your phone away and play with your kids.  It doesn’t have to be long, but trust me, the rewards will be big.  Or perhaps it’s as simple as greeting your husband at the end of the day with a smile instead of complaints or a to-do list.  Whatever it is, it will be noticed and over time, you will start to reap the healthy produce of your garden, especially in your relationships.  And that is key on a journey of thriving in this crazy but amazing life!