Lessons From the Garden

School is out! Our whirlwind Family-Reunion trip to Yellowstone is over. I'm officially done teaching piano lessons for the summer! Now that the commotion is settled a bit, it's time to try to organize our crazy life. This week we are focusing on weeding our back-yard gardens. They have been somewhat neglected in this last month's push to get everything done. The kids have been troopers, weeding every morning for an hour or two.

Today was our fourth day working in the yard and with the heat of summer finally arriving, it was a bit harder getting I-mac motivated to work this morning. I had been thinking about how, even though our yard still needs a lot of work, because of the efforts we have made this spring, it looks so much better than it did last year. I thought about how that was like life, we are never perfect, but the more we work at improving, the better we get, and the easier it gets to do what we should. I thought I would entice I-mac to work by asking him to help me think of ways that gardening is like life. Believe it or not, there is little he likes more than philosophizing about life with an interested adult. My enticement worked and he was soon working beside me, enlightening me with his insights into weeds and life. Here are some of the lessons I learned from him today:

1. We are the plants. Like plants, we need good things in our life to help us grow and become what we need to be. Some of those good things include reading the scriptures, praying, going to church and making good choices.

2. Weeds are like sin. When they come into our life they choke out the good things in our life. If we don't get rid of them they will eventually kill us (spiritually speaking). Some weeds (ie. sins) are harder to get rid of than others. It's important to get rid of them when they are little or they can be nearly impossible to get rid of later. Morning glory is easy to pull, but it grows fast and quickly chokes out the plants. I-mac thought this was like t.v. or other things that aren't necessarily sins, but don't really help us to be better. When we do them too much they cover up who we really are and it is hard for us to choose to do the good things we need to grow.

3. Weeding is like repenting. As we repent, we remove the bad things from our life. We can't do the weeding ourselves, we have to turn to the Savior for repentance. He is like the gardener in our life. He fills us with the good, and allows us to get rid of the bad. It is important to get the roots out or the weed will just keep coming back. This is the part of the repentance process where we turn from our sin and promise never to do it again.

4. The soil is like the gospel. Plants in good soil, grow stronger and bigger, and the weeds are easier to get rid of. These are people with the gospel in their life. Plants in poor soil are smaller and the weeds are really hard to pull. These are the people without the gospel.

These are just a few of the ideas that he shared. This kid never ceases to amaze me. He thinks so deeply. He often comes up with things that I never thought of before. What a blessing it is to be taught by our children.