The Plant Killer...

I am a plant murderer. 

I have never been good at keeping plants alive.  You know that whole movement of ‘buy your wife plants because flowers just die.’ That was the worst day of my life. Cut flowers are supposed to die; it's okay if they die. But if you buy a girl a plant and she kills it then she just feels worse. My husband tried several times with several plants. I even killed the cactus that literally required no water.

You can imagine my yard is not an overflowing garden of luscious greenery. It is, however, full of weeds.  I have not successfully gotten anything to grow that I've tried to plant, but the weeds persist.  

A few weeks ago I was coming home and noticed that the weeds were getting a little out of control in our driveway and I thought to myself, “Self, we should go cut those weeds down.” When I got out of my car and a little closer, I remembered that those weeds that were so tall actually turn into sunflowers in the fall!

I was so excited! These sunflowers just spontaneously started growing and have propagated every year, and each year I have a few more. I would love to figure out how to transplant them into my flower bed so it can look like I grew them on purpose.

As I sat there staring at my weed flowers, it made me think about the other “weeds” in my life. The things that are hard, the difficult situations, the unexpected challenges that pop up, and how I always wish I could just eliminate those things from my life. 

But I've realized, looking back over some of the hard things I have faced, that they've turned into something beautiful and most have prepared me for further challenges.

Sometimes we have weeds in our life and they're ugly and annoying and they keep growing and they're hard to take care of and sometimes we just want to cut them all out, but if we let the weeds grow a little bit longer they turn into beautiful sunflowers.

So let the weeds grow a little longer…