What I Learned While Weeding

I am grateful for our large garden.  There are many benefits to raising a family with a garden.  We learn about the law of the harvest, discipline, and timing. We learn about how to meet challenges and enjoy healthier food. It does however, take time, and lots of it to plan, till, plant, fertilize, weed and harvest. Did I say weed? This is perhaps the most time consuming job in our garden and where we chose to ignore the problem, the weeds take over.

 

While on my knees weeding down the rows of corn, I have pulled a lot of quack grass.  It always surprised me that the quack grass grows profusely in the corn.  It is as if it is trying to look like corn, act like corn and be like corn so it won't be pulled.  While weeding the potatoes, I have noticed a similar phenomenon.  Red root grows profusely in the potatoes.  It looks similar to a potato plant and stares at me almost defiantly as if saying, "I'm a potato, don't pull me."  These weeds act as impostors trying to pose as the real thing.  They sit there staring at me trying to pose as the original and they are not.  I look at those weeds and I say, "I know what you are.  I know what you are trying to be. I can tell the difference between you and the vegetable intended for this space."

There are trends, fads and causes posing like the real thing.  They are not.  There are no adequate substitutes for the real thing in family, marriage and worship. It is almost as if they are saying, "Here, we are!  We are the real thing!"  But red root does not grow potatoes and quack grass will never grow ears of corn.  

At the colloquium on marriage and family at the Vatican in Rome, Italy in 2014, many world religious leaders spoke on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family. Pope Francis said, 

“We now live in a culture of the temporary, ... This revolution in manners and morals has often flown the flag of freedom, but in fact it has brought spiritual and material devastation to countless human beings..."(1)

The temporary he spoke of reminds me of what is trying hard to look like the real thing in my garden. Henry B. Eyring said, 

"We take the commitment and the sanctity of marriage to a greater level ... families go back to before this earth was and ... they can go forward into eternity." (2)

The concept that marriage and family are eternal, going both directions is the real thing! And there is nothing like the real thing.  Just as we can't pull ears of corn from quack grass, we wouldn't put our feet in a sandbox and say we had spent a day at the beach. The sweet taste of the fruit comes from the authentic and real vegetable, bush or tree. The gorgeous shore line of the beach is truly seen and felt by those who strive for the family ideal on the horizon.  Strong traditional families are the basic units of a stable society and of eternity.  That is the real thing!

1. Pope Francis, address at Humanum: An International Interreligious Colloquium on the Complementarity of Man and Woman, Nov. 17, 2014, humanum.it/en/videos; see also zenit.org/en/articles/pope-francis-address-at-opening-of-colloquium-on-complementarity-of-man-and-woman.
2.  https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2015/04/why-marriage-and-family-matter-everywhere-in-the-world?lang=eng&_r=1