Background

Over the past year or so, I have occasionally written about my experiences with an invasive garden weed. Not knowing what it is, I have named it froblemacz. I dig, fertilize, and plant each year. I return to find my garden filled with this unknown and unwanted weed. I dig and dig and dig to remove it, but the next year, I find that froblemacz has taken a larger share of the garden than it did the previous year.

There are some spiritual lessons to derive from gardening. Jesus told some parables which focus around planting, caring for, and harvesting from, gardens. Well, farms, but the principle is the same. I'm finding that we don't understand what he said, because our produce comes from the supermarket, not from the yard. Unless you actually get out there, digging in the soil, all the commentaries in world cannot convey to you the meaning of "the farmer sows the word ..." and neither can your pastor's sermons.

Growing a garden will change the way you think about the economy. The global food system pushes for efficiency. This means that deliveries are just-enough, just-in-time. Should there be some kind of "catastrophic event" that affects the transportation and delivery system, people in the affected area could suffer and even starve before sufficient assistance could arrive. The global food system pushes for uniformity, and thus, promotes genetically-modified organisms (GMO) crops over traditional air-polinated crops. With air polination, you are never completely sure whether a particular plant will be tall or short, whether it will produce in July or in August, or whether it will be subject to the ravages of any particular pest or disease. And yet, that variety makes the whole crop more resilient, because any particular pest or disease is likely to affect only a portion of the whole crop. If a GMO variety is susceptible to a particular pest, the entire crop is at risk.

Once you grow your own vegetables, you won't enjoy the hard, flavorless, yellowish-orange things sold as tomatoes in the supermarkets. You won't want the insipid white and brown stuff that burger joints call lettuce, either. You'll enjoy grapes that actually have flavor that is as intense as "your first time". You'll notice that not every tomato tastes the same as its neighbor, but that most of them are still very good. Some plants may be tall, others short. Some will be upright, others spreading. Some will have a few large fruits, others may have larger numbers of smaller fruits. One plant might attract a lot of insects, while its neighbor remains almost bug-free.

These home-grown fruits and vegetables will almost certainly be more nutritious than supermarket produce. And it will taste far better. For its purpose will be to reward you for the work of growing it, not to remain sellable through a long trip to the market.

But without the challenges of planting, de-weeding, and cultivating, your crops, you may never stick around long enough to harvest. Your enjoyment of the harvest is partly based upon the investment of your time and effort into producing it. When you talk to young believers, they frequently have these outsize goals. I'm going to be the President Obama of witnessing, they say. Though they do not yet know it, their words are empty, because they have not yet faced the challenges. It is only after the challenges have repeatedly forced them to cut back on their plans that they wind up focused on the one or two things that they should be doing.

Yes, froblemacz is essential to your spiritual growth. Hardship helps to refine you, by causing the inner temptations that were always there (but unrecognized) to rise to the top, where you can deal with them. It refines your vision by causing you to prioritize your efforts once you see that your broad wish list is unattainable. Without froblemacz, we would be nothing more than spiritual amoebas. So the next time you see weeds in your garden, physical or otherwise, approach the task of removing them with anticipation, for it is in this process that you will discover what you should be growing.