In our garden we like to grow many different things. I love to see the ground tilled up, the seeds planted and watered and the fruit harvested and picked. It is an experience worth having in every sense of the word. However, that experience is too often accompanied by a great many challenges. Those challenges sometimes make me wonder if the experience is worth the effort.
For instance, we like to grow potatoes. We eat a lot of potatoes and it always makes sense to us to grow enough to put into the root cellar to use during the winter. Early in the spring, we choose the spot in the garden for potatoes. It must be a place where there have not been potatoes in the previous year in order to prevent a certain kind of disease in the potatoes. Once chosen, the spot is tilled numerous times, making the soil soft, pliable and ready for growth. The seed potatoes are purchased and the rows are marked and prepared. Finally, the seed is planted and the watering/weeding process begins.
All of this preparation is, to me, a great time to work in the soil, renew my feelings, take a deep breath and put winter behind me. I guess in a way, it's a healing process. It makes me feel like I'm starting fresh; that the past is behind me and everything is new. There a new seeds, newly plowed earth, bright sunlight, spring rain and a feeling of life that comes with it all. If I could just stay right there, in that wonderful, “Spring” feeling, I would be that happiest of women. But time and the summer marches on and I soon find myself dreading to go outside in the heat to weed the garden that has been overtaken by bind weed and grass. Bugs of every kind eat the leaves and fruit which I have so lovingly planted and cared for. And my potatoes, my poor potatoes. Try as I might, they always end up covered in potato bugs, wilting and dying.
It doesn't help that summer time is the busiest time of the year for me. I have more pressing obligations to fulfill in the summer than at any other time, making it extremely difficult to give my full attention to the garden. After such enjoyable planting and preparation, my garden soon becomes a source of extreme disappointment and discouragement. Once the weeds and bugs have taken over, I don't even want to go out there. It really is a sad thing, because I would like very much to be able to spend the summer just caring for that garden, bringing out the bountiful harvest that was meant to be.
I have thought about this dilemma, again and again. How is it that something that begins so well, and promises so much, can turn out so badly, even with all my good intentions and hard work. It reminds me of this great country in which we live. At it's beginnings it was planted with all the good that could be had at the time. Great men with good intentions planted the seeds of freedom and peace in a spot of ground that was the best that could be found. Expectations were high and the future was bright. Then the summer came.
It would be foolish for me to ignore the bugs and weeds taking over my garden. Doing so would mean no harvest to be used to help feed us in the winter. So, all summer long, I fight the battle of the weeds and bugs, heat and scheduling. It is no longer the happy planting time, filled with hope and expectation. It becomes merely a fight for the survival of something worth eating. I consider the harvest worth the effort and have endured blisters, sunburn, aching back, and more, just to save some few of those plants.
Now if a garden is worth that kind of effort, how much more should the freedom and peace of our country be worth? We might need to rearrange our schedules a little bit or change our daily priorities in order to do battle with the weeds that seem to be encroaching upon our lives and freedoms. But the alternative, I'm afraid, is that our children may not have anything to sustain them during the winter of their lives if this garden becomes completely over-run with weeds and bugs. And if we don't do the weeding, who will?
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