Last Updated on July 20, 2012

I love my garden. My husband made it for me! It’s organic. It grows weeds, rocks, and some vegetables. It has an arbor, even! And I think one of the things I love most are all the things it teaches my kids.

See, I had this “aha” from a professor, who specifically mentioned gardening. He was talking about Deuteronomy 6, particularly verses 6–9:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The way I read this, God’s saying to talk about Scripture everywhere with my family, using every example I can find. Can you imagine all of the connections you can make to the Word in a garden? To dirt? To growth? And to my specialty, weeds? The Garden of Eden. What God made man from. The parable of the soils. How cool.

The guy who pointed this out even brought up the idea that among other reasons, God may have given man the concept of bread, for example, so that we’d understand who God is when Jesus said, “I am the Bread of Life.” He was suggesting that God gave us all these little realities around us (water like the Living Water, light like the Light of the World …) in part to help us—and our kids—understand the supreme Reality: Him.

So now I’m learning to look for more and more opportunites to incorporate Scripture (as in the sword of the Spirit, the breath of God, and what we live on besides food) into my kids’ everyday life. It takes some thought and strategy … but I should have plennnnty of time while I pull weeds.

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4 Comments

  1. Tracey Lanter says:

    So true! Mom's have opportunity to turn the "everyday" into teachable moments. And girl friend…I'm right there with you – pulling weeds! 🙂

  2. Julia DesCarpentrie says:

    I have been looking for an excuse to raise weeds, I mean plant a garden- what a great idea to use it as a teaching tool. Now if I could just import some of that Central IL black topsoil…

  3. My neighbors and I recently eradicated a Virginia creeper, which was choking the life out of our joint lilac hedge (one man's weed, another man's wonderful plant 🙂
    Over the past three years, I have dutifully attacked the creeper — and continually was reminded of sin; how, if allowed to grow unchecked, leads to many more problems; how it chokes fruit in my life; how much time it takes to deal with consequences — and I could go on.
    Maybe during your weeding times, you could add to these thoughts?

  4. Janel Breitenstein says:

    Sharon, I have a morning glory that must be some embarrassing relative of your Virginia creeper. That thing comes back every year–not unlike some "seasonal" sins in my life: the conditions become ripe and my sinful nature seizes the opportunity!
    I think you hit on something, too, in noting that one man's weed is another's wonderful plant! Some actions can be sin in one circumstance, and not in another (for example, saying a phrase in one situation could be completely wrong in another…I have personal experience with this. 🙂 Yet Proverbs says "A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver").
    Or take the analogy from a completely different angle–one sin that a non-believer may groom meticulously (say, materialism) is something that, in our own Spirit-touched lives, is something that compels us to yell, "Would you just DIE, please?!"
    Makes me thankful that He's the Vine and His Father's the Vinedresser (John 15)!