Maybe some of you reading this are expert gardeners. (If so, please come do an audit of my porch garden!) I, however, am not.

Case in point, when my husband and I moved into our house about a year ago, we were thrilled that the previous homeowner, Jenny, was an expert gardener, and a meticulous homeowner at that!

She was kind enough to leave both a front flower bed full of gorgeous blooms, and a printout of what flowers lived where at the house, and when they tended to bloom.

She had things well under control, so we pretty much left it all alone, except for trying to pull the occasional weed out.

The problem was, however, that we didn’t exactly know which ones were weeds, and when we weren’t sure, we defaulted to not picking them, in case we accidentally took out a prized dahlia or something.

That strategy worked out fine for our first year, but recently, took us down a bad path.

We noticed our “elephant ear” starting to grow pretty quickly here in our second spring, so we checked it against ChatGPT, just to make sure it wasn’t a weed.

Chat told us not to worry- it was rhubarb!

We figured we were in the clear.

That is, until it grew two feet in like 3 weeks, even passing the little tree in our garden:

After that, we researched it further, and as it turns out, NOT RHUBARB.

It’s a fast-growing, dormant weed that often looks innocuous in years 1 and 2 before showing its true colors in year 3.

Oh, did I mention it tends to smother and crowd out everything around it??

Finally, armed with this new and more accurate information, my sweet husband chopped it down and tried to pull as much of the roots out of the ground as he could.

This resulted in a sad, giant hole in our flower bed where these poor other flowers have just been fighting for their lives all spring:

Do you notice anything else in this picture, though?

Check out the flower to the right. We hadn’t even been able to see her before cutting down her invasive neighbor, and she’s like 4 feet long! She’s also growing quite sideways, as you can tell.

Sometimes, when we’re dealing with weeds in our lives, we’re still growing, just in a different direction than we anticipated.

Have you ever had a season where you felt crowded out and suffocated by your circumstances? Maybe you experienced a loss or divide in your family, or financial hardship, or relational conflicts. When you made it to the other side, did you feel like you had grown in unexpected ways?

I’ve certainly experienced that. I entered college, for example, planning on growing in academic expertise, and I left college navigating my parents’ divorce and my first breakup.

At the time, those circumstances seemed devastating, and they felt like they sucked all the air and life out of me for awhile. Looking back on that season, though, as devastating as those changes were, they also allowed me to grow in unexpected ways. In empathy. Resilience. Compassion. Desire to help others.

If you feel like you’re growing weeds in your life right now, and not flowers, my heart goes out to you. I hope you can be encouraged that the weeds won’t last forever- but your strength and how you’re growing through them will.

I know that’s an easy thing to say, and another thing altogether to go through right now, in this moment, but I truly hope and pray that you can lean on your community and a God who loves you in every season and circumstance to get you through this.

I hope you don’t feel alone in this, and that you’re just one seed away from something more beautiful than you could have ever planned springing up where the weeds have been.

You’ve got this, wildflower!