Not everything that grows in a garden belongs there. That’s what I learned as I spent the day cleaning out my front flower bed which was in desperate need of some TLC. I’m not one to love gardening, but the fact that this is the first thing you see when you arrive at my house, and it looked as messy as it did,  prompted me to get in there and clean it all up. It was a whole days endeavor and quite honestly, my landscaping partner, Sky, did most of the work. (That’s my daughter for those of you who don’t know) -Or maybe I should say the toughest part of the work-  It began with what we thought was going to be a minor facelift. Pulling some weeds, planting some new flowers, watering them and “ta-da” brand new garden right? Yeah, it didn’t quite work out that way. The deeper we got in the project, the more we realized that this was going to require a lot of physical exertion coupled with patience and persistence.

Besides the constant squatting they put me through, the weeds weren’t difficult to get rid of, just time consuming. But the shrubs!!! Those were another story.  There were sucker shrubs everywhere!!! The roots of these were widely spread out and they were colonizing the space in a vicious way.  With a machete in one hand and a spade in the other, my makeshift landscaper uprooted every single sucker shrub with a force unlike any I’ve ever seen a 17 year old girl have! Now, when I tell you that these roots were resistant, its an understatement. They were tough! She wrestled with the roots pushing them backwards and forwards, she dug to expose the root, she chopped them with the machete, and she pulled vigorously until she freed the root ball from the soil. Some were uprooted faster than others and some were quite the challenge!

Nonetheless, it had to be done, otherwise anything we would have planted would have been overwhelmed by the already established deep roots of these shrubs.  

I can’t help but to see the similarity of these deep roots in my garden with the roots of deceit that sometimes compromise the positive things trying to grow in our life. For years, I lived with fear that was so deep rooted that I couldn’t pull it from the source. This fear sucked the life out of every good thing that tried to flourish within me. No sooner had a good seed been planted when the lies that stem from fear swallowed it all up.

Suckers are everywhere and if we give them room to grow in our life, it can become an endless cycle where every hope, aspiration, dream, experience, or opportunity is suffocated by a root that’s deeply embedded in us and widespread. If we aren’t vigilant, before we know it, we can have a garden full of suckers!     

I’m not sure about you, but the uprooting of any falsehood, bad experience, or trauma is not something I can handle alone. Just like it required someone with more strength than me to uproot the sucker shrubs, it also requires someone with more strength than me to pull out all the dysfunction that has somehow creeped its way into my life. For this job, I rely on G-d alone; my Master landscaper.

Not in my garden; Sucker!!!!