Over the weekend I spent a few hours removing weeds and over-grown grass from the flower beds in both the front and back yards. As I was crawling around on my knees I had a moment of clarity about cultivating our own spirituality.
If you don't establish boundaries in your life, then bad (or seemingly harmless) stuff starts to creep into places it shouldn't.
First, a little history lesson...
About a year ago, Deb and I decided to fix up the flower beds in our yard so that they would look nice for Caitlyn's third birthday party. We decided to remove some bushes (that didn't match the other bushes) in the front beds and plant matching bushes for green and some mums for color. In the back, we decided to plant some green and gold shrubs around the fence line and put potted mums at the outer corner of the bed.
When we did all this work we spent several weekends in a row de-weeding the beds, cleaning up the existing foliage, and preparing the beds for new plant life. We made sure to put down a layer of weed block before dumping new mulch into the beds. However, one of the things we did not do was to purchase and install any kind of border treatments to clearly delineate the flower beds from the yard.
Now, back to this past weekend...
My original intention for my flower bed work was to remove the weeds that had made their way thru the weed block and make sure they were all gone, but what I found myself doing most often was clearing away grass that had crept over the non-existent boundary between the yard and the flower beds. It was in the midst of yanking out the tentacles of St. Augustine that I received a divine whisper saying, "This is why you need a Sabbath."
It stopped me in my tracks.
I learned three things from those moments in the dirt:
- Establishing clear boundaries are essential to sustained spiritual health
- Even good stuff (grass) can creep where it doesn't belong and begin to feel like bad stuff (weeds)
- Without regular attention and maintenance, any spiritual growth can be derailed
I'll spend the rest of this week expounding on these three points.
So, what epiphanies have you had while attending to the yard, flowers, house, etc.? What moments of clarity in the midst of regular living have stopped you in your tracks?
