...I never promised you a rose garden

My love for roses began when I was a child. I can remember the climbing rose outside my bedroom window, impervious to the hostile elements of city dirt. Aside from its incomparable beauty, I especially recall the delicate fragrance that filled the room on summer mornings. 

And so, when I bought my first house and had a real back yard, I decided I was going to start a garden and plant roses. I was convinced the soil would be perfect since the house was only a few yards away yards away from a babbling brook. Well this bucolic setting did not live up to its billing: the under-soil was clay and rock, and the stream, eventually taught me more than I ever wanted to know about ground water, hydrostatic water pressure and flooded basements. 

I spent hours digging just one hole, extracting rocks and breaking poor quality spades to plant one rose bush. I persevered and in time, I had a row of beautiful multi-colored roses which I fed and watered faithfully. For a few weeks I took pride in their growth but it wasn’t long before they began to wither, one by one, and die. What could have happened? Despite, my relentless tending, I learned that the ground’s inability to drain caused the roots to “drown.” With all my digging and watering, I learned that I never amended the soil properly to begin with and that clay soil his a hostile environment for most flowering plants.

In many ways my initial efforts as a rose gardener efforts can serve as a metaphor for many moments in my life. Sometimes, everything’s coming up roses and sometimes I come up with rocks and wind up breaking things in the process. Sometimes, I just give up and say the heck with it.

Jesus is asking us here to bring in our best dirt and appropriate fertilizer, so that his Way can take root deep within us. This isn’t something that happens by chance, or because we’re fortunate to have good genes. It’s something we work at. We’re the ones charged with tilling our own soil so that the Life which Jesus sows may grow in us, and produce a bounty…even if we wind up breaking a few shovels and spades in the process; there’s no giving up. The prize is worth it.Matthew 13: 1- 9, 18-23