I’ll never forget my first trip, as an adult, back to my grandfather’s farm. It’s about three miles up a winding road to where a towering maple tree dominated a sunny meadow knoll.
My brothers and I used to sit there on summer days and count the railroad cars of the trains we could see far across the river, a thousand feet below.
Grandpa’s work horses, and sometimes cows, grazing in that meadow kept the grass trimmed. There were well worn paths that formed concentric half circles you could count as you looked down toward the white farm house and log barns.
But when we got to the knoll, we hardly recognized it. The three story tree was gone, burned out, actually, apparently the victim of a vicious lightning strike. And looking down into the valley we could see. . . nothing but the weeds, undergrowth, and saplings which had taken over the meadow after a farmer’s loving care had ceased decades earlier.
That image often comes back to my mind, not just as nostalgia but an object lesson for living. We all make choices of what to plant, whether the oaks of ambition, the corn of faithfulness, or the shrubbery of nurture. We sow and plant many good things in the garden of life.
But unless there is diligence in tending those plants, weeds and wispy saplings quickly overtake the cultivated acres and grazing land and return them to the state of a primeval forest. We don’t plant them. They already are there in seed form, ready to reclaim the land.
Relationships, careers, occupations, and even hobbies need to be tended or they will be ruined, overrun by the weeds of neglect or choked out by the vines of indifference.
Surely, each of us has some weed pulling to do in the gardens and fields which are our family, friendships, and workplaces. Otherwise, one day we may hardly recognize them as our own.
I went past the field of the sluggard,
past the vineyard of the man who lacks judgment;
thorns had come up everywhere,
the ground was covered with weeds,
and the stone wall was in ruins.
I applied my heart to what I observed
and learned a lesson from what I saw:
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest—
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.
Proverbs 24:30-34