What Am I Trying to Grow?
What is it I’m choosing not to grow in order to give my vocation the space it needs?
It’s early spring here in the South, and on my front patio the pots of pansies were full to bursting with lush green tufts of wild-sown grass.
I don’t live where lawns grow easily. It takes endless cycles of water and fertilizer and meticulous maintenance to get a passable lawn, and that lawn will never be as soft and verdant as what just pops up like weeds summer after summer in more temperate climates. So against the backdrop of my front yard pine-barren where even the xeriscaping hangs on by a thread, a flower pot of tall green grass is the very picture of life and hope and beauty.
Also, it needed to go.
I planted the pansies late this year (they are our over-winter consolation for living in a land with no snow; if you move the pots into deeper shade as it warms up, they can survive maybe even into June before the heat wins the war), so the plants were still small and hadn’t yet taken over the entirety of the potting soil in their circle of imported-fertility. In that open space the grass had sprung up, so lovely, and was taking over.
I had to decide: What are you trying to grow?
I could take my pick. Either way, I’d win a square foot of spring greenery. If I wanted grass, I could do nothing, let it go wild. If I wanted pansies? All the grass had to be pulled, stat, even though, like I say, it was so darn beautiful to those of us who just don’t get grass like that, not out on the hot, dry, sandy soil of real life.
I voted for the pansies, carefully rooted out the grass, done. Mentally told myself “What are you trying to grow?” as I did it, because it was the only way to stomach losing this beautiful-to-us circle of lawn that we also had loved.
And the so on around the yard. Tiny, deep-green shoots of oregano lacing across fistfuls of foliage where last year’s black-eyed Susans had dropped their seeds? Carefully, carefully extract those beautiful tendrils of the one from the broad, rounded leaves of the newly-emerging other, because you have to choose. Not-to-choose is to choose, oregano would win. I know that patch of morning shade behind the porch, I know very well what it will favor if the plants are made to battle it out.
As I cleaned out the drainage ditch, I said it even more fervently: What are you trying to grow? A passage for rainwater, in that case, against puddling at the foundation of the house. So hard to dig up seedlings sprouting in the winter’s accumulation of silt, but there? We needed that channel to stay barren for a few meters, send all that thunderstorm water to the daylilies farther away from the building.
Such a good question: What are you trying to grow?
I can use it for deciding on my Lenten prayer, penance, and almsgiving. I can use it to direct the day-to-day and strategic actions of my ministry. I can use it to make decisions about how to order my workday and how to order my leisure.
Will the thing I’m trying to grow even survive under the present conditions of my soul? Of my state in life? Of my wider world?
Or am I trying to grow something that just doesn’t grow here?
Could it grow here if I adopted a few changes? If so, should it?
If it should, what do I need to change in order to make that growth possible? What is it I’m choosing not to grow in order to give this thing the space it needs?
On this theme: I’d be remiss not mention one of my all-time favorite Lenten devotionals, my friend Margaret Rose Realy’s Cultivating God’s Garden through Lent. I was hesitant to open it the first time because I wasn’t sure I’d like it, but then I ended up binge-praying it cover to cover. (I think it was a review copy? Can’t remember.) Fantastic book.
Currently out of print in paperback but available on Kindle. It’s best read from front to back with no skipping around, so it works in that format. Works for any kind of pacing for your Lent, you don’t have to have a specific schedule for reading it, you can just pick it up whenever you need something fresh to spur you on.
Cover art for Cultivating God’s Garden through Lent by Margaret Rose Realy. If you read it and find it beneficial, please leave a review at Amazon, Goodreads, or your favorite bookseller’s website.