Upheld In Tangles or The Story of The Rhody

Growing Weeds With Insanity

After a summer of watering and growing weeds, I finally made it out to the garden to tend to my plants. Poor things, they barely survived as far as I can tell. What has been a beautiful garden full of colorful flowers was a tangled up mess this year. Well, I can’t do EVERYTHING, right?

My single rhododendron hasn’t had a flower on it in years. I can’t even remember how many years. Every spring, I would give it some food, water it, make an attempt to free it from the grasses and weeds growing in and through it and then stand back and hope for the best. It’s sort of like that definition of insanity—right? Keep doing the same thing and hope for different results!

For the rhody, those results were pretty predictable. Like nothing.

The poor thing was planted in totally inappropriate ground for it. Too sunny, too dry, too much undergrowth, and I mean insidious weed roots spreading underground. Those are everywhere! I live in a semi-wild area.

Last year I decided to move the rhody to another, more comfortable, spot for it. A spot that didn’t have those @*$& roots underground, more shade and a wetter environment. That was last year. Finally—I just moved it. I hope it will be happier and grow and produce the beautiful flowers I once saw on it.

Stealthy Regression

As I spent a couple hours digging the rhody out of the ground, then pulling grasses and other tangled stuff from it’s roots, I reflected on how sin has a grip on us.

First, it was hard to get the plant out of the ground. Sin entrenches our lives in it. Undisturbed, it will continue to harden around us. It will invite its sinister friends to join in the entwining of our roots. Sin is sneaky, we don’t always notice what it is doing to us. How our good roots, needed for our healthy growth, are subtly and treacherously surrounded and even infiltrated.

Second, tugging weed roots out of the rhody’s root system was tedious and difficult. Those weeds have a pretty strong grasp!

Grasses grow up around us, obscuring our vision. Finally, our blooms disappear and we don’t produce anymore. We become an eyesore.

Tangle Purging 

Then comes the day we get uprooted. Our whole environment gets destroyed. Circumstances change drastically and we are undone.

But, if we allow our Heavenly Gardner to do His job, we get our roots carefully cleaned out, we get some good food and a new, clean home tailored to our needs. He plants us and we can bloom because we are now free to do so!

“The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed” Genesis 2:8.