A few weekends ago, I spent the better part of a morning pulling weeds out of my front lawn. As I did so, I started thinking about how we decide what plants are weeds. One of the dictionary definitions of a weed is ‘a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.’ So perhaps, what we really mean by a “weed” is something we did not intend to be where it is.

Our spiritual life is often compared to a garden, and sometimes Lent is viewed as the time for gettin gout there and “weeding the garden.” What we mean by that phrase is to uproot everything that doesn’t match our vision of what our garden, our spiritual lives, ought to look like. But I wonder if, perhaps, we are missing something when we focus exclusively on uprooting those weeds. When we declare something that is living and flowering to have no value simply because it is not where we expected it to be, we are in effect closing our eyes to the beauty it may produce. We blind ourselves to grace and glory in favor of our own expectations and plans.

Perhaps, this Lent, we can spend some time in appreciation of the beauty we already have in our spiritual lives, instead of trying to force our spiritual lives into some preconceived idea of what a perfect spiritual life “ought” to look like. A spiritual discipline, in my opinion, is anything that, when practiced faithfully, brings us closer to God or to another human being, and those particular disciplines, may be different for each one of us. So while we cultivate and care for our spiritual plants, we can also appreciate the weeds.