Sometimes I sit on a blog post like it were an egg, coaxing it to hatch. I love it, love writing as a form of expression. But, “the making of books is many and much study wearies the body”–my friend Megan (and King Solomon, the dear chap) wisely reminds me. I regularly pay no attention to this proverb. I’m obsessive, a veritable cliff jumper, plunging into stacks of notes and quotes and verses and thought. Then I abandon them and fuss about my scattered ways. I get lost in another hobby and mosey my way into my paint, my music, my garden, my books, kid stuff.
But lately there have been several turning over for awhile, warming up in the incubator of my brain. It takes us space; it won’t vacate the premises. I’ve got this image of my younger self, wishing someone would explain things to her, holding out for a nonjudgmental person to unleash some explaining. I had a million questions and I was too afraid to ask them, thinking I ought to know it all intrinsically, as if it were a matter of human experience. If I didn’t know the answer, perhaps it was just because I was stupid. I doubted my own ability to become a person who held any water. I doubted I mattered. I thought I was a menial, unimportant consequence inflicted on the earth.
Then I grew up.
I found I am not unimportant, inconsequential. I’ve been bought at a price; my life is not my own (1 Cor. 6:20). I learned asking questions is a good thing. I learned I wasn’t stupid, wasn’t just a silly afterthought. And I haven’t forgot there are other people out there who need to be reassured the same thing.
In the front of my mind are the people who read the posts now; in the back of my mind, I am trained on my children. I am out to refute the false messages the world is pouring in my ears, my children’s ears. I am pounding a stake in the ground and pouring a firm foundation. I’m asking you to grab a hold and hang on, because a deluge is in progress.
Two months ago in lockdown, I dumped a load of seeds onto our front lawn. My little girl wanted to sow “crazy flowers”–wildflowers–so I tossed out a mix I had saved from the previous fall. We watched them grow, and surprisingly two un-wild-flowery looking plants stole our attention. The leaves looked like watermelon leaves. We laughed and supposed we had somehow mixed up a packet of watermelon seeds with the flowers (not unusual for us). Sure enough, blossoms. Yellow and cup-like, promising fruit. But the stem was spiky with thorns, and it shot up out of the ground instead of crawling like a vine. We watched closely, and small green globes appeared where the flowers died. Watermelons, we smiled at one another. Lucky for us, we had another growing in our back garden, no doubt the sowing of a child’s hand. It was near the squash and corn. It had plenty of space to grow. A week went by. I watered faithfully, marvelling at the fruity pebble conglomeration of zinnias in every hue, the secret promise of watermelons sprawling beneath the wildflowers. Only us, I chuckled to myself, only our little fun family would grow fruit in the front yard.
It was one night after I’d taken the dog on a walk and picked up the mail that I paused in the flower bed and examined the watermelon plant more closely. It was a curious sight, next to the bunny-nibbled zinnias. The rabbits were leaving my fruit plant alone, and now I saw why. Bright green balls covered the stalks, and each sphere was studded with vicious thorns.
Alarmed, I had a sudden thought. This cannot be a watermelon plant.
Three proofs stood in favor of my hypothesis:
Watermelons aren’t poky. Watermelons are big. Watermelons crawl on the grown.
I did a quick Google search. The results confirmed it. We were not growing watermelons, but a nasty, prickly buffalobur nightshade.
Take care, the article with a matching picture warned, and do not mess with this toxic plant. The prickles with cause long-lasting pain. Buffalobur’s innately evil nature is apparent in its ability to cause solanine and nitrate poisoning.
Here I had let it grow to a foot tall, gleefully thinking we had watermelon just blooming on the vine. I was proud. I’d let my precious little girl meander in the zinnias around it, never having a clue what we were tending.
I love stumbling upon metaphors. Apparently my oldest son does, too. I caught his scribbling words down in the corner of his dot-to-dot book during this morning’s sermon, and he relayed it to me over lunch.
“I thought of a good one today, Mom,” he said. “People are like cats. They try to climb to the top of their scratching post to show dominance. Then when they fall, they scramble to their feet and look around and pretend nothing just happened.”
He is catching on. And both metaphors are timely: beautiful, dangerous weeds and haughty, self-possessed humans. Our world is full of both.
In The Last Battle (Chronicles of Narnia) by C.S. Lewis, the characters suddenly enter a new and wondrous world, one that is “more Narnia” than the last. A group of grumpy Dwarfs have also somehow entered into this post-life Heaven, but they perceive they are in a dirty, dingy and dark stable. They roll and gripe, each complaining over the situation, even as Lucy and Tirian try to awaken them to the Truth.
You are in paradise, the friends assure them. Look! Beauty and perfection surround us!
Distressed, Lucy pleads with the lion, Aslan.
“Aslan, could you–will you–do something for these poor Dwarfs?”
“Dearest,” said Aslan, “I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do.”
He then provides a great feast for the Dwarfs, but to them it only appears as rotting vegetables and goblets of dirty water. The whining and groaning gets louder. They are outraged.
Aslan turns to Lucy and says,“You see? They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
In a few words, Aslan is saying this: diseased perception is diseased reality. Getting caught up in the ruckus of this world, going along with the flow–is the worst kind of ball and chain. It perpetuates malcontentment. A chasing after the wind. A futile grasp at happiness. A stroll through a field of prickles. Those who see will become blind. They won’t know a weed when they see it.
Friends, we are living in the burr patch, glorious zinnias intermingling with toxic thorny bushes. Confusion reigns, and some are satisfied being dissatisfied. It is confounding, but we might not convince folks of the danger. We might not shake everyone to life while we are here on this earth. We might not coax them into reality, because they have chosen to close their eyes and remain in the dark.
But we can still point it out, for those who are compelled to yank weeds and those not content with just a cat’s social reflex. We can ask questions, we can find answers. For those who want to believe, but need help seeing in the dark.
For the thirteen year old me, who thought she was just plain stupid.
For the thirty-six year old me, who knows she’s not.
There is truth. It is worth clinging to. And you deserve to know it.
