How growing a garden is like raising children. It takes patience and love | Opinion

The time is past due for me to plant my tiny garden. I have spent months thinking about what I want to plant and how I want my garden to look. In my mind, my garden will look like the gardens in the slick gardening magazines, all colorful and perfect.

I admit — I am not much of a gardener. I lack the skills of creating a perfect garden. But I love to watch things grow. I plant seeds, and sometimes they sprout and sometimes they don’t. But I keep on trying.

Recently I bought some seeds — purple pod beans, scallions, onions, thyme, pole beans, chives, basil, and okra. Now all I have to do is prepare the ground, plant my seeds, water them and watch them grow.

I wish it was easy as that. But we know that growing flowers and vegetables is kind of like nurturing little human beings. It takes constant care. We feed, water and cultivate them, but the outcome must come from the Lord.

I have learned that growing a garden is much like life: Things don’t always turn out the way we want them to. Sometimes, as in gardening, our natural soil is bad, and whenever the seeds of goodness have been planted and our souls have been watered, the seedlings still struggle to poke their tiny heads out. They struggle to stay alive because the soil, or soul, lacks the nutrients to help them grow.

When my sons were little, I wanted them to know where the vegetables that I insisted they eat came from. So, we prepared a space in the backyard where we were living at the time, sectioned out three rows and planted carrots and green beans and, of course, watermelon.

I remember how excited they were when the tiny sprouts started poking up through the dirt. It was their job to keep the garden watered and weeded. It was hard work for two little boys, who were only 8 and 5 at the time.

As their mom, I believed I was teaching them responsibility. It was their job to nurture and care for their garden just as it was my responsibility to nurture and care for them. That’s what I tried to instill in them.

We enjoyed the first crop of beans and carrots. We weren’t so fortunate with the watermelon. The lone fruit was struck by lightening during a summer storm. One thing for sure, my boys learned responsibility, but they were clearly not the future farmers of America.

They also learned that sometimes it’s not just the bad soil that keeps our garden from growing. Sometimes it’s the invasion of weeds and insects (hate, malice, envy, lies) that threaten our spiritual garden that we must also fight.

In our natural garden, there will be days when the heavens won’t drop enough rain, and we will have to see to it that our garden is watered. It takes work to grow a garden.

Isn’t that just like life? Life… living takes work.

I am reminded of a conversation I had recently with a much younger friend. We talked about friendships and what it takes to have a healthy relationship with someone, and how sometimes that someone can be your own sibling.

As it turned out, my friend was having a problem cultivating a meaningful relationship with her siblings. As we talked it dawned on me again, just how similar growing a garden and cultivating friendships is.

Like unwanted weeds that pop up in our gardens, unhealthy thoughts can pop up in our mind and in the minds of those we love most. It is our job, I said to her, to make sure we keep our spiritual garden free from such weeds.

Just as we pull weeds from our natural garden, we must also weed out the bad thoughts and opinions we might have of others, never allowing any foreign thing to invade and take root.

While I am not a counselor, I believe I know enough about God’s word to give sound advice when it comes to matters of the heart. Also, I have lived 88 years on God’s good Earth. I would like to think that I have learned a few things about life and how to treat others.

So, I simply gave her my personal testimony. I told her how I have cultivated friendships throughout my life; how I learned to overlook the small stuff, how not to hold grudges.

I told her about the times some of my good friends betrayed me, and how I handled it. I told her I learned, through prayer, how to forgive and continue to love – sometimes at a distance.

I told her that sometimes the person who hurt you won’t understand how you can be so forgiving. After all, they know what they did to hurt you. But forgiving them is as much a blessing to you as it is to them. There is no weakness in forgiveness.

To me, nurturing a friendship is like nurturing a garden. You pull out all the weeds in a garden, and you keep the good plants. I believe it should be that way with friendships. We throw away the bad and keep the good.

None of us is perfect. I’m sure I have ways that my friends have put up with simply because the good in me outweighs my crazy idiosyncrasies.

Weeding a garden takes patience and lots of work. So does growing friendships and relationships with siblings. Ridding our heart and mind of ugly thoughts and suspicions about others takes prayer and patience. Yet, for some reason, it always seems easier to believe a lie or a bad report about someone.

That’s just like weeds in a natural garden. They seem to poke up sooner and grow faster. But we know what to do: Get rid of them fast, before they choke our precious plants.

I’ll try to remember my own advice as I get ready to plant my natural garden.

This story was originally published May 1, 2026 at 2:16 PM.