2013 Challenge: To Not Sew a Single Seed

Catalogs became the voice of the devil to me

What would happen to my life if I didn't sew a single seed in my garden?  I began wondering about this a few years ago when pain levels in my back began making it increasingly difficult to garden and have decided actually do it and see what will happen.  That may not sound hard to some of you, but for someone like me who has passionately gardened for decades, I am finding it at times to be very challenging.

For instance, those seed catalogs that I so love to see come in the mail have turned into the voice of the devil to me.  No more fun shopping those gorgeous photos of luscious lettuces and tempting tomatoes.   I wouldn't you know it, I opened my mailbox the day after making this decision and out popped two of my very favorite seed catalogs on the same day. "NO, NO, NO! This is not fair!" I shouted waving them in the air so God could see them and everyone else too, laughing at the irony of it all.  My neighbors must think I am a loon sometimes.

When the seed packets were put out at our local grocery store I just had to peek.  Just once you know...take a little peek to see if there was anything new this year which I realized was really seeing what I was going to be missing and a really bad idea too by the way.  Standing there in the isle in front of God and everybody I suddenly realized  I could not buy a single one of them even if I wanted to!  Resisting the temptation to envision gorgeous lush Mascara lettuce plants or killer Laciniato kale or beautiful Bull's Blood beets I could grow was awful and hard and sad.  The reality of it all, even though I knew it was good for me was harder than I expected and my eyes welled up with tears.  Suddenly I realized I had better get away from the racks before I lost it completely.

This whole exercise in letting go of growing from seed is probably good for me I keep telling myself.  Not probably, it is actually very good for me and for two reasons.  First, because I have chronic back pain, 24/7 rob your life kind of chronic pain, back pain that has gotten so bad that it is basically crippled me.  I can't sew seeds if I cannot take care of the plants and to take care of the plants I need to be able to shovel, which I can't do, and I can't kneel or bend to weed, and I absolutely cannot lug a hose...you get the picture.  (I still secretly dream of digging...I miss digging more than any others work in the garden.)  I know I need to be careful with what I do and that means the gardening has to go.  This pain was the impetus for my taking on this challenge which also has made it easier to accept.  Hopefully it will be a part of me sticking to it too.  Harder is convincing other people that gardening is not something I should be doing right now.

Some of you are probably wondering why I don't get my husband to garden. Let me stop you right there before you attempt to voice that thought...No! No! No!  That man, who I love dearly, is best when he just fixes things and stays out of the garden!  We all have things we just cannot do very well and his is gardening so don't even go there!  He proved that long ago when I trusted him to help water the veggie garden while I was at a family reunion.  I demonstrated what needed done and recommended what not to do and why...he did the later.  I got home to find half the tomato plants had died for lack of water because he thought he set up this smart watering system, the one I warned him not to.  I just cannot trust the man because he is always trying to do things by "sciencing them out" which almost always fails. (ugh...Sorry Honey...I love ya but you are no gardener.) 

At this point I have not been able to take care of the garden as it should be for three years and I am more than ready to let it go.   It has become a bit of a nightmare and needs a total makeover, as in an "extreme garden makeover".  Outside of a miracle that will not be happening by my hand unless I gain my health back and even then the desire to garden like I used to just isn't there anymore.

God has been trying to get it through my thick scull that there is something else He wants me do besides gardening which honestly was my whole life for several years.  I kept getting nudges to use other gifts and talents, like writing and art...not that I am incredibly artistic but God has this crazy way of taking what we have and making it wonderful so I am game.  But what should I do?  That was and is the big question for me right now.  There are enough options that it is making this pretty exciting actually. 

There are a lot of friends out there who know only that I know a lot about plants and little else about me.  It has been difficult for them to wrap their minds around the idea of me not gardening because it was my identity for so long.  To them I have always been "Patty the Plant Lady" and gardening is what I do!  I am Patty who talks in Latin and can grow anything from cuttings and Patty, the lady everyone goes to with their plant questions.  Yes, that WAS me, and I am still that person...just not like I used to be, I am becoming more.

Gardening and plants had taken up so much of my life I think I got lost in the process; I had become a "gardenaholic" as we gardeners jokingly say.  But honestly I think I really was addicted to it.  I used it as an escape, as my identity and I buried myself beneath it like a drunk hides in his bottle. The truer me was trapped beneath it all, my desires laying dormant, waiting to grow, to bloom the way God intended for me too from the beginning. 

This has been confirmed to me as since having to let go of being "the gardener" I have seen an increased desire to grow in other areas that were not as well cultivated as my plant nerd self was.  Desires to do things I used to do and some things I've never done before have been sprouting up like spring seedlings.  It's time for those other things to be brought forward and I am really excited by some of the possibilities.

So by laying down my trowel, the shovel and hoe, giving away all the seeds of temptation I have stored up in my pretty little heart and head, I am now opening my hands and my heart to what God has next.  I am getting ready for my next assignment and gaining better understanding of who this me is that God has designed so wonderfully.  Preparing myself in mind and body, through studying scriptures, reading books, working hard on getting my back health restored...it is me taking this journey hand in hand with my God, one step at a time.  It will be interesting to see where it takes me and I look forward to what I will discover.  Stay tuned!

Jeremiah 29:11
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plant for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.



Copyright © 2013 by Patty Hicks

All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. All reviews must include author's name and a link back to this blog.

Cutting Away The Deadwood

A small sampling of my collected past

It’s a hard and good thing to look at what one has and realize when its time to let things go. To come to that point where you get it, that what you have collected, maybe things you used to enjoy using or owning are somehow keeping you from moving forward.  You can no longer look at them the way you once did because you see them from a completely different perspective.  You see them like anchors that keep you lashed to your past, hindrances that keep you from moving into your future.  If you hold onto them you know you will be held back from growing, from achieving tomorrow’s provision and blessing.  It is a season of surrender, of giving up and letting go of what is familiar to the future you know you are supposed to take hold of.

Class outlines and information I used to glean from and collect.

That is where I am right now.  I am digging through file drawers of paper, looking at every piece, remembering and releasing.  Life is not static and my circumstances and God’s work in providing a new path for my future have called me to let it go and move on.  It feels odd how cathartic this is for me as I wade through things; there is a kind of lightness I feel in my heart, an unburdening from thinking about these things.  My mind not focused on what I “used to use” or thought I would use.  There is a freedom from feeling I have to go in that old direction and from the feeling of failure that I didn't complete some goal. There is also a sweetness in the remembering as I touch pages of my words, pictures of my past.  It’s amazing how much I’d forgotten I’d kept and I found myself in tears more than once.  Sometimes the tears were from happiness, sometimes because it was a little harder than what I thought it would be to let go.  I press on.

A portion of the memorabilia pile...heartwood.

In spite of how I may feel, I know I have to dig out from under yesterday to realize my tomorrow.  I long for new growth more than the familiarity and keeping of the past.  This is why I persevere in the process.  I am not looking to accomplish it all with one giant effort but bit by bit like doing restorative pruning on an old apple tree.  First remove the dead wood, then remove congestion and finally prune for fruiting.

Our Quince tree in its restorative pruning process will produce better fruit for us this year.

It takes time to prune like this, on a tree it takes a few years to bring restoration. For me in this process it will be a few months, maybe even a year before I begin to see that fruit I’m looking for.  I’m thankful for this understanding.  My files of collected information and ideas, class outlines and memorabilia could not have been conquered in one session.  It took two times going through them just to get them down to something that looked to be manageable.

All that stuff boiled down...now to manage this well.

This job will not complete until I have set up my systems to keep myself organized and discipline myself to working this new system so it serves me in the future and doesn't turn into another anchor.  That will be the interesting part. Creating something useful and manageable in light of who I am and how I work.  Its funny how we think we know who we are and how we work and how different that is from reality when we really begin to dig in…that is if we are being truly honest about what we are looking at and dealing with.

I’m a dreamer, I’m a designer, I’m an artist and these collected ideas are like candy to me, fodder for future projects. Some people pack rat stuff, real tangible things like figurines or toys or dishes or cook books…me I love to collect ideas and information.  The challenge…to ask myself why I want to keep any of it and be brutally honest.  I think I’m doing pretty well so far.

I can see my own weaknesses as I go through the piles of files and papers in front of me.  “What was I thinking?  Why did I feel I had to keep this stuff?” I laugh out loud. Granted, there is a lot more online today than there ever was on paper back when I began to file ideas away.  I can already see possible problems that might arise if I'm not careful however I really like things on paper better than digital files; the whole organic nature of it, the feel, the smell and its easier for me to read and edit off of a piece of paper than on my computer.  I “loved” revisiting information and ideas I “collected”, things that inspired me, that fed my creative soul and my inner nerd…emphasis on past tense here is important as that is in part what brought the congestion.  My weaknesses are revealed and I can breath.

The past is what it was and I'm moving on

As I dug through the mountain of my collection one thing that made me laugh was how my tastes in styles have changed.  It really brought home how much I needed to clean out that dead wood.  Another thing was how even that information I had used to teach with had changed too.  It was one of those “looking into a time capsule” moments for me and it hit me like a brick…I’m living in the now, not the then.

The work I did in college, my papers, my weed collection (yes I had a weed collection, they are plants after all), all the notes…those were really difficult to part with because of all I had invested them.  Actually husband was not helping at all here either and wanted me to keep the binder with my vast weed collection as a family heirloom!  With that, I decided it would be the first things to go.  I didn’t want to start calling my work an heirloom as I knew it wasn’t that beautiful.  Thankfully my college papers are digitally filed so no need to keep the hard copies with the teacher's notes…and if something happens to the computer and I lose it all I won’t die, nor will anyone else.  Life goes on.  There are other things I’d rather be remembered for.  I don’t want to be remembered for how smart I am but how I loved and helped to make other’s lives better and for how much I love my Savior.

To stay or go into the future, the choice is yours

Where I thought I was going back then no longer matters, I have to listen to where God is telling me I am going today and I don’t want to live in the time capsule of the past so out it goes.  So far I have recycled nearly one whole 60 gallon roll-cart from my past.  I’m still scratching my head at how out of hand things had gotten and I’m not all that disorganized. I just never went back often enough to prune out old wood, thus the congestion.

Pruning for fruit is where the heart is really dealt with.  We love the memories of the past and what is attached to those memories like the branches of a tree that gave us such lovely fruit in years past.  For myself it was and probably will continue to be anything to do with gardening.  I love learning about plants, I love teaching about plants, I love propagating plants, digging in the soil and the beauty I’ve worked to create.  This is indeed the most difficult of all this pruning process.  These old branches must be pruned though and they will always have a presence in my future but my focus will be more balanced and the struggle for good fruit less difficult as long as this pruning is maintained.

I am ready for that blade to be laid to this branch of my life that is so integrally attached to my heart.  It is the most important part of this process because strikes at the heart of the crossroads in my life.  My letting go or holding on will affect the future.  God has something new for me and I want to go with Him, not lag behind in my past.  I’m not exactly sure what exactly that looks like yet but I know that nothing surrendered, nothing experienced and no mistakes made are ever lost in God’s economy.  He uses all things for good in the lives of His children.  This knowledge has helped me to do this with freedom and without fear.  My heart is filled with expectation and hope instead of fear and anxiety.

Meeting the future with an expectant heart

As I begin to walk into this new future God has for me I will have to look at the heart of why I am choosing to keep something.  If I do chose to keep it I will need to remind myself that at some point in the future, I will need to let it go.  I’m hoping for the discipline to keep the creativity flowing and not bogged down by past notions like I’ve been feeling this past couple of years. Besides, there is only so much information I will ever really use in my lifetime and often these ideas are just that and nothing more.  They hold no tangible use nor intrinsic value and if there are enough of them just end up being that anchor tied around my leg that holds me to the past.  Time to cut the rope and move on with my life.

So its time to get real here.  My tack, at least for this season, is that I don’t keep anything I’m not currently working on until I get a clear view of where I’m to be heading.  One foot in front of the other with care and purpose.  I’ve discovered that collecting good ideas can bury the view of the path one is supposed to be taking causing one to veer off from it or at least muddy it up real good and causing us to not move with the freedom God desires in our lives.  These collections can stall creativity by keeping the mind focused on the collected things instead of allowing free flowing ideas and new creativity.  I cannot count the number if good ideas I threw out when I filled that roll cart...and they were good ideas back when I collected then.  But I don’t want to settle just for good ideas, I want the best ideas, those that God will prosper, those that will bless others and those that will leave the kind of legacy I want to leave behind.  So out with the old and congestion and lay that blade where You must God, I'm ready for my future.

It's Not Bad Just Different

What do to, what to do?  The past 18 years I have given myself to learning about, practicing and teaching gardening and now it seems that God is taking me in a completely different direction. I'm sure to others it may even seem that I am throwing away something I should hold on to.  My answer to them is that they don't live in my life, hear what God has spoken to me, nor traveled all the paths God has taken me down to get me to let go of my life completely and surrender my future to Him without reserve.  This is not at all a sudden change either but has been quite gradual, taking years of Him working on my heart and mind, teaching me to trust Him with my now and future and to be able to lay down the past so I can head into that future with Him.  And that is exactly what I intend to do.

I think the condition of my garden today says a lot of what my own human efforts to "make" my life have rendered.  There has been some beauty and benefit, but it has not been sustainable and as I look out over the garden, though it still bears some resemblance to the once beautifully kept garden of a decade ago, it demonstrates how helpless I am to really control things after all.  The flowers still bloom, the birds and bees still flutter around happily and the cats still lounge in areas that used to be chamomile paths though the chamomile has long since died out and been replaced by other ground covers and weeds.

So the garden is in full decline now and the chaos of nature has taken over where a gardener's guiding hand once fostered order.  I no longer have the strength to dig, weed and mulch and am finding the desire to do so eclipsed by something bigger that I cannot even explain except to say that it is something I can feel deep within my soul that won't let me go.  I want to make a difference in people's lives for Jesus and to fully surrender to whatever that looks like by God's definition and not mine this time.

The fence surrounding my garden is rotting away and was pulled apart by some errant youth who thought it fun to yank at the pickets leaving a wound next to the welcoming gate and a sad spot in my heart as I remember how cheerful it looked in its beginning.  How many plans in my life have also rotted away or been pulled apart by life's circumstances.


The weeds have taken to covering the unprotected soil that I used to mulch religiously so to smother errant weed seeds, disallowing them opportunity to ruin what I had worked so hard to create. My precious plants are now fighting among themselves for the right to survive in this ground.  I have no control anymore.  I look with some regret as the lesser desirables swallow a favorite plant eventually killing it out...and such is life.  Human efforts never last.  This is a hard lesson to learn when one no longer can tend to a garden loved or maintain some favorite work or effort that brought joy and satisfaction or maybe identity to their life.  I know this is not just my story but the story of many of us.

Chaos is not a beautiful thing but savage in my garden.  My eyes long for restful views with clean paths and mulched beds and plants that are kept within their bounds.  But that is life...and life must go on...so I look to my Savior to find rest for my soul and I pray my garden will one day be renovated or even erased so I won't hear its pleading cries as I peer into the chaos that reigns there today.  Renovated even as God has renovated my heart and life, pulling out the things that I had put in place of Him and what He wants for me so that I am a blank slate ready for my Master's hand. 

If you think me crazy or foolish because I don't walk the common path of human understanding and hold fast to what I have invested all that time in to gain the knowledge I have about plants then I guess I'm right where I need to be, looking the fool for Christ.  You see it isn't about what I know at all, it's about what He knows!  And only God knows what comes next.

Whatever "next" is for me is clearly going to be different than what was.  That does not mean it will be bad, just different.  When I begin to explain to people that I am laying down this "thing" I have been doing that everyone thinks is so grand, they all blanch and moan like its bad, giving me that "look" and trying to explain to me that they think its going to come back around or that I'm somehow mistaken.  But I don't care if I ever pick it back up again.  I'm done trying to do my own thing.  I usurped the gifts God had given me of exhortation and teaching into this thing called gardening because it was there, not because I prayed about it and was following God's will.  I did it to draw attention to myself, to be known as an expert and looked up to, to be found worthy and accepted and I'm quite honestly wanting to throw up right now at the distaste of this knowledge.  How thankful I am that God loves me enough to get in my face and show me the truth of my attitudes when they stink so I can turn away from them and be restored to what He has for me.  The beautiful woman of God, gifted and pleasing in His sight.

If you know me you may not have seen all of these things in me but they were definitely there and it was ugly. Me all puffed up in my knowledge and anxiously struggling.  Thankfully God would not let me continue on and finally broke me like that imperfect pot in the potter's hands that has to be broken and then softened so it can be reshaped.  I've suffered the breaking, the pouring of the water and the reshaping and the firing...but do not yet see for what purpose I am to be used.  It may and will probably be better than anything I have ever imagined which is what I expect as God is in the business of doing things bigger and better than anything we could ever ask or even imagine.

So go ahead God, knock my socks off!  Blow me away!  Take my breath away in amazement and make me dance with the gleeful delight of a child at the site of what You do! I'm all Yours...and I can't wait to see what You have for me next.

Copyright © 2010 by Patty Hicks

All rights reserved. No part of this blog may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. All reviews must include author's name and a link back to this blog.