In Full Bloom

My grandma has a green thumb.  Well, I think she does.  Over the years, I have seen her plant vegetables and flowers, and they all flourish.  She’ll tell me the name of her flowers, and I’ll promptly forget.  But I love to see them in full bloom.

When I became a homeowner, creating a floral oasis in front of my home was high on my agenda.  I recruited Bible Study Mama and Bible Study Brother to get this project off the ground.  We ripped out those boring old bushes that were lined up in front of the house, rented a machine to till the soil, and got to work.  Really Bible Study Mama got to work because she loves gadgets, but that’s another story for another day.

By the end of that day, we were exhausted but pleased with our progress.  Hydrangeas have my heart and we had planted four hydrangeas and some calla lilies.  The hard part was waiting for them to become fully rooted in the soil and watching for the new buds every spring.  Or at least, I thought that was going to be the hard part.

The hardest part was the weeds.  Man, they were everywhere.  I researched many different methods to eradicate those jokers.  They pushed through the mulch faster than my beautiful plants could grow.  I wanted them gone!!!  Year after year, I would pull and spray.  It was a hard fight.  Finally, I found a chemical that promised results.  But I needed to be careful to not let it touch any of the plants that I wanted to live.  Well, I got tired and squirted some on a hydrangea.  Surely, that little bit wouldn’t kill it.  Right?

Wrong.  Over the next few days, I watched all my beautiful plants die.  They all began to wither.  Oh, I won the war with the weeds, but I also lost the war with the plants that I wanted to thrive and survive.  This is definitely a tale of caution for the body of Christ.  Some of us love the work of winning a soul.  We will cultivate the ground to make the soil ripe and ready.  We plant seeds.  We water them.  Then we wait for them to accept the Lord.  We’re thrilled to see them bloom.

Then as soon as they bloom and accept the Lord, we notice all the things that don’t look like Christ.  And that just won’t do for us.  We want our garden to reflect our good God.  And we should reflect Christ’s beauty, but we get overzealous in OUR efforts to eliminate the weeds that come up in their lives.  We begin to speak to them in ways that are unkind.  We’re not trying to kill them.  Just those things that aren’t like Christ.  But in the process, we begin to kill the bloom that was once so beautiful.  They find it harder to see Christ because we continue to drop poison in the garden.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t correct someone if we know that what they’re doing is wrong.  I don’t have a friend that won’t tell me when I’m out of line.  But we also have a responsibility to not kill others because they don’t live up to our own images.  We weren’t called to condemn the world.  We were called to introduce them to the Christ who died, was buried, and resurrected to save the world.

I had to pull up all the dead plants.  I now just mow over that flower bed and dream of the day that it will be teeming with plants again.  Although the large flower bed is empty, my smaller one has four rose bushes.  And they are beginning to bloom and showcase their beauty.  The weeds are present in that garden, but I’ve learned my lesson.  I take my time removing them.  It requires more patience, but the end result is worth it.  #wepreach