“…and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Jesus

John 8:32 NASB

If you we are not defined by our feelings and if we are people of choice, what does that say about our current state of feeling? How do we get to the place of not allowing our feelings to define us? Just how do we get to the place of making wise choices in spite of our feelings? As with anything in life, we get there by starting at the beginning.

When I was a boy, my family had a large garden. This garden was a main source of food for us. We canned tomatoes. We froze corn. We canned green beans. We grew potatoes and okra and carrots and radishes and anything else that might provide sustenance for our family through the winter months. It was my joy to help with that garden - at least during certain phases of said garden! It was a treat to help cut the potatoes into seed potatoes, making sure each cube of potatoes contained at least one eye. I thoroughly enjoyed the planting of the seeds because it meant that in the coming days I would experience the privilege of watching the seeds spout and the tiny leaves breaking through the ground in search of sunshine. One of my joys was also when harvest time came. For some reason, I loved following the plow as my dad would lay the furrows over exposing mounds of ready-to-eat potatoes!

Some things about gardening I did not enjoy so much, though. One of my memories of helping with the garden was that it needed to be tended in spite of the summer’s heat. Tending to that garden involved making sure pests did not ruin the plants. Going from cornstalk to cornstalk and painstakingly applying the pesticide power was tedious. And potato bugs! My mom would pay me one penny for each potato bug I came to her with, borne in via the coffee tin she provided for the task. While fun at first, the sheer number of potato bugs seemed daunting and never-ending, so numerous were the leaf-eating insects. While the tasks of applying pesticide and the capture of potato bugs seemed tiresome and boring after a while, my least favorite chore would prove to be a wealth of truth-drenched wisdom that would prove vitally useful in my later years. That chore? Weeding the garden!

Nearly every day of each week, my mother would assign me a particular row or sets of rows of vegetables to weed in the garden. Using the hoe I had been assigned, I would make my way up and down each row of that garden, chopping the tops off the green shoots of weeds that had somehow made their way into the row. It was easy to see the weeds that grew between the corn rows, but difficult to see the weeds that grew between the bushy stalks of the ever-expanding green beans. I quickly came to realize that I could skip some of the weeds in the rows of green beans since my work - or lack thereof - would be obscured!

This worked well for me until a week or two had passed and my mother’s inspection called my weeding skills into question! Pulling back the bushy heads of the green bean plants, she showed me where the weeds that I thought had been hidden so well had almost overgrown and overtaken the plants we were depending on for food. After this, she took me to the rows of corn I thought I had done a great job on were being overtaken by weeds as well. “I thought you told me you had weeded these rows of corn and that you had weeded the rows of green beans!” My feeble response, “But mom, I did!”

Firmly, she took me back to the rows of green beans and had me kneel down and pull back the leaves of the bushy green bean plants. “Son, weeds grow where you cannot necessarily see. Just because you can’t see them does not mean they aren’t there. And those weeds among the corn? Just because you use a hoe and chop them down, does not mean they are not still there. You never kill a weed until you get to the root. You can chop off the top of the weed all day long and never get rid of it. That means you’re going to have to expose the weeds among the green beans and you’re going to need to pull them up by hand, roots and all. Same with the corn. And don’t just leave the weed plants nearby. Place them in the burn pile otherwise they will take root wherever you throw them. You must dispose of them properly.”

As with weeds in a garden, we can allow wrong thinking to take root in our minds or we can chop at them with good intentions - or we can get to the root of those wrong thoughts and rid them from the garden of our mind once and for all. Which sounds like the better option to you? Of course you opted for the truth, right? Yet, you still find yourself a bit bewildered as to exactly how to do that. First things first. Just what is the truth? Until we settle that issue, we might as well be chopping off the tops of the weeds - or worse still - pretending they can’t be seen.

Dennis Jernigan

Photo courtesy of https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2015/04/19/11/52/dandelion-729693_1280.jpg