My Mom’s garden has been teaching me more about life than I ever imagined it would. If you've ever attempted to perfect your green thumb then you know it takes a lot of work to maintain, but the end results are so beautiful and worth it. Read more to find out how the Lord used nature to speak to my heart and ever so gently but firmly fix my attention on what I refused to acknowledge to get me to the next step on my Healing Journey.
Confession time……I’m a major procrastinator. I don’t know where or when I learned this habit but it’s seemed to have stuck well into my adult years. When I was a kid it wasn’t such a big deal. I would know about an assignment being due weeks in advance, but yet somehow, as the calendar progressed, I would find myself the night before it was due wondering why I waited so long to start and then I’d be in literal tears from all the self inflicted pressure I had placed on myself. It’s like without that pressure, it wasn’t getting done. Proverbs 12:24 must’ve been referring to me when it said, ”...... laziness ends in forced labor." Why did I do that to my younger self? Heck, why do I still do that to my adult self? Times have changed for me in the sense that I don’t have any teachers expecting 3000 word essays from me, and I don’t have the sort of job where projects are due on a regular basis thank Heavens, but it plays out in a different way for me. This procrastinating spirit in me has actually interfered with my healing process over the years. Let me explain how and maybe you can relate.
Let’s talk about ADDRESSING the UNADDRESSED. Does reading that make you feel uncomfortable? Because if I’m being honest, just typing it made me cringe. Let me go a step further in this confession session and admit that even sitting down to write this, I avoided. But what I'm learning is that the topics I don’t want to address are the actual ones I need to address the MOST. The topics we avoid are the ones that need the most attention in our lives. The more uncomfortable, shameful, hurtful, regretful, embarrassing memories sometimes need attention so its power over us doesn’t hold weight any longer. I’m a firm believer that the areas we struggle with in life don’t have to remain a struggle. If we got real with ourselves for longer than the moment it takes to just acknowledge what we know internally is out of alignment, then maybe we’d actually make some progress and put to rest what’s been haunting us for so long. Ignoring a problem doesn't ever make it go away. We can try sticking our head in the sand, but eventually we have to come up for air, and you know what? Our problems will still be there waiting for us to address them.
So why do we do this? Why do we hold onto what we should let go of? Why do we intentionally ignore what we need to give attention to? Let’s start to peel back this onion shall we?
Here are some of my why’s for intentionally ignoring the elephant in the room that’s literally doing a two-step dance to get my attention:
I’m scared of the ugly emotions that may arise and not being able to control them
I’m not “ready” to deal with truth about myself, admit my bad decisions or take responsibility for them
I’m avoiding potential & speculated conflict (with another person)
I’m in the passive phase of my passive aggressiveness
I’m not feeling mentally prepared for what I know I need to face
I’m in denial over what’s really happening on a deeper level
I’m in denial that I might even be part of the problem
I’m shifting blame and responsibility for my issues to someone else
I’m afraid of how someone else might respond/not respond to my reconciliation attempt
I make the task at hand much bigger in my mind (really need a “that was easy” button)
*I don’t want to relive or revisit a traumatic experience that I’ve worked so hard at suppressing
I doubt my own coping skills
I'm afraid that God won't show up for me, feeling unworthy of His support especially in cases where I might've caused my own grief (this is a commonly used lie from the pit of hell)
So those are just some of my why’s, and the How’s for how I actually go about avoiding can vary also. More on that in another post. Know that they're different for each person. But essentially it's just making myself insanely busy and distracting myself with every activity under the sun to avoid quieting my spirit and stopping to hear from the Lord.
The problem with our avoidant activities isn't so much about being busy or the actual activities themselves, but what I want you to see is the lack of balance between work and play. When I say work, I mean the spiritual and emotional work necessary to bring about our healing. Imagine healing being like a hidden treasure. It’s there waiting to be discovered, but it’s not going to get discovered as we distract ourselves with so many other life tasks or as we hit play on our 50th ticktock video for the month.
If you notice most of my why’s for avoiding what I need to address are ALL fear based reasons. 2 Timothy 1:7 reminds us that fear is not of God, so every single last reason on my list, was a negative seed planted by the enemy himself! Wow, look at just how much he wants to keep me bound in the pain of my past! Fear based reasoning never gets us very far, and there’s a reason the Bible says in Isaiah 41:10 “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help You, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Oh how I love that verse. Because it’s just a reminder that I don’t have to face anything I’m afraid of alone. Jesus promises to be there with me and with you as you unpack that emotional mess known as our past. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read my previous post titled, “Bag Lady” please check it out here when you can for more on getting rid of emotional baggage.
1 John 4:18 tells us that, “Perfect love casts out all fear”. Well, if you were ever confused on what that verse means, know that, God is love, He’s the One who casts out all the fear, when we choose to put our hope and trust in Him.
But what is FEAR anyway? False. Evidence. Appearing. Real. Half the things we worry about really don’t end up coming into fruition. I know this to be true, so what is it we’re really afraid of? Knowing that the thing we’re avoiding causes so much anxiety and sleepless nights, why wouldn’t we just deal with it head on and be done with it? Why not just face our fears and get it over with? Because we haven't fully cast out the fear causing us to avoid in the first place.
Last spring, I decided to gift my mom with a garden. Well, really she has a plot of dirt with old shrubs and I just wanted to make it something beautiful for her to look at when she looked outside her window or sat on her porch. There was only one problem, these two unsightly non flowering waste of space shrubs! Sorry to all the tree huggers out there. Anyway, I recruited my dear friend Andrea and we yanked and pulled and dug up the shrubs. But as spring ramped up and the transition to summer started, guess what happened? Weeds! Weeds started appearing literally out of no where. Ahhh! but was it really out of nowhere? See, they were under the soils surface the entire time, I just never saw them so I couldn’t ADDRESS them. So if there were so many of them, how could I have NOT known they were there? You might be thinking…….
Because the root system of the ugly shrubs had been competing with them for years. Now that the shrubs were gone, the weeds had SO much room to grow and spread out. Which is kind of a good thing, because by them coming to the surface, I could pull them out and actually get rid of them. Think of the those big shrubs as life today as you know it. The everyday distractions, or your coping mechanisms or emotional crutches and your avoidant activities.
It doesn’t end there though. I went on a weed killing frenzy. I bought the biggest bottle of Roundup gardening spray, and that took care of it for a while until they started to grow again. I’ll never forget how fast they grew. I remember one little weed in particular was about 3 to 4 inches tall when I first noticed it and I thought, “oh I’ll pull that one out on my next visit”. A few weeks later it looked like a cross between Jack’s bean stalk and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors, completely out of control. It got so bad so quickly that I had to hire a professional landscaper to do damage control. So after the landscaper did their treatment, it was finally time to “plant my seeds”. Peonies shipped all the way from Europe! The ground had been “treated” and the soil was fertile and ready. Funny how a bag of potting soil from Home Depot can make one think of Hosea 10:2, “Sow righteousness for yourselves, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until He comes and showers His righteousness on you.” Break up your unplowed ground, that sounds like an invitation to get a little messy but for a good reason. Let's look internally for how we can begin to soften our hardened hearts.
With all that prep work it was such a great feeling to finally make it to peony planting day. What a relief, all that messy work was behind me. Let’s fast forward to the end of the summer and I take a look down at the garden after a few weeks and you can imagine the horror that swept over me as I saw very teeny tiny little green weed sprouts trying to make a comeback. Thinking about my peonies and how I didn’t want anything to interfere with them, I got on my hands and knees so fast and started manually pulling up each and every weed, but this time digging deeper to get more of its root so it couldn’t regrow. As tiny as they were, why go through all this? Because I know what would have happened if I left them there. If I didn’t address the weed problem in the garden, those good seeds that I planted wouldn’t take root like I needed them too. They’d be competing for water, nutrients and sunlight with those weeds that had no place being there, but JUST like our unaddressed issues that keep resurfacing constantly whether we like it or not, those weeds, those unaddressed root issues need to be pulled out by its root. Let’s compare those good seeds to our Healing and new renewed way of thinking. Let's think about the good seeds as our new healthy lifestyle, one of balance and forgiveness for who hurt us and freedom from resentment. Those are all good seeds being planted in the new garden of your heart that need to be watered with God’s Word and tended to by His Holy Spirit.
But life is good right now Kimberly, I don't want to start airing my dirty laundry, or anyone else's, or looking for skeletons in any closets. Or you could say the opposite, I'm just dealing with TOO much right now, I can't possibly add another thing to my already stressed out life. Well you know what I say to that? There's NEVER going to be a right time. Ever. You're either going to be on your mountaintop season or your valley season, so now what? You're never going to address what needs to be addressed? That's why I love the Bible so much, it deals with every single last excuse we could possibly come up with. Check out Ecc 11:4 , it says, "if you wait for perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done". We convince ourselves that we can just do it later, or talk about it later but more times than not, later never comes. Why wait till later when we have today? May I also remind you that tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us. Let's stop walking around perpetually on edge, full of anxiety, tense, always offended or on the brink of tears or nervous breakdown.
“The topics we avoid are the ones that need the most attention in our lives. The more uncomfortable, shameful, hurtful, regretful, embarrassing memories sometimes need attention so its power over us doesn’t hold weight any longer.”
Here’s why addressing our personal issues are so important, because if we can’t address our own issues, then how are we to be in relationship with others? How will we address our relational issues with them and continue to live in peace and harmony like we’re called to in Hebrews 12:14? Unaddressed issues don't ever go away. Our unaddressed pain starts to become engrained into our personality and it may take years to show up but it ALWAYS makes a reappearance. That unresolved issue you had with your parent, 9 times out of 10 will resurface with your own child. Why? bc that's just how life is. It keeps giving us the SAME lessons until we heed them.
For a long while I slapped the “estranged” label on one of my own parents and I really didn’t have to. Something about that word estranged, when ppl hear it they back off. It keeps all questions at bay, and means "don't even go there bruh!", it's deeper and messier than you know. When we say it, it gives us a pass to be done with them and bring closure to a part of our mind as if it's a closed case. Except, it's not. Probably takes more effort to keep forgetting that they exist and are walking around somewhere out there. Deep down, nobody ever really wants to be estranged either, it's just the easier route to take to deal with an insane amount of pain, rejection or betrayal. Touchy, I know, but guess what? It needs to be addressed.
Sure the relationship with my parent isn’t the best but God knows I’ve tried to keep communication open and forgive the unacknowledged hurts because it’s what I’m called to do as a Christian. We laugh here and there and keep up with each other on a surface level, and I'm ok with that for now. At the end of the day, I can’t worry about how they choose to respond to me, I can’t force anyone to “be my friend” so to speak or demand they love me the way I’d like them to. But I can control how I respond to them. A lot of times, frustratingly enough, people are so out of touch that they won’t even know what they did to hurt you. And no, sorry, explaining it to them with facts, charts, dates and FBI levels of data collection won’t help them understand either. You can’t let that keep you from making progress with your healing.
Unfortunately, un-forgiveness and unhealed unaddressed pain doesn’t stay neat and tidy in the little compartmentalized part of our heart and mind. What you’ve actually done is numb a part of your heart and deemed it unaccessible. That’s a heart that isn’t free to love fully and completely those in your life that you really do want to love. Like your children or your spouse or anyone else in your friends and family circle. Just like those weeds, that numbness can spread out and infect other areas of your life whether you realize it or not.
Maybe you don’t have an unaddressed issue with anyone else. What if it’s with yourself? For a long time, I was mad at myself for making such bad choices in my younger years. You may or may not already know that a person’s relationship with themselves absolutely effects how they relate to others. The relationship I had with myself and with my parent represented a significant relationship that I had given up on. When that happens, we’re not able to give or receive love from our Heavenly Father and from others the way He intended us to because a part of us is still sealed off emotionally. That’s not fair to yourself or the relationship that requires you to be fully present for it to succeed. We can’t wonder why things don’t work out relationship after relationship when we keep going on in this cycle. Before I could move on emotionally and mentally I had to forgive myself. Only then could I extend that forgiveness to someone else. I had to accept my past for what it was, and see how God’s redeeming power could pull me out of the pit I had dug for myself. Once my numb heart was healed I could finally accept the Love of God that I kept reading about and finally begin to feel it and believe it and that’s when a tangible change started. That’s when my relationships began to change for the better as well.
I know this may be a lot to digest. I also know it's not easy to acknowledge but what I’m encouraging you to do is take the 1st step. Get real with yourself and do a self evaluation. Address that lingering thought that just won’t go away. Address that horrible memory that seems to haunt you and take it to the Lord. He’s the only one who can stop the tape from playing on repeat. He’s the only one who can heal your anxiety and depression or short tempter. Let’s dig deeper and find what our personal weeds are and pull them out from their root. There’s a beautiful garden of peace, hope and healing waiting for you on the other side.
Is there anything from your past that keeps coming up that you’d like freedom from? Are you wanting guidance on how to take the first steps towards addressing your unaddressed issues? Please email me here and let’s pray through it together.
Happy Healing!
Love,
Comments