Lawn and Order

I hear: “Bloom where you’re planted.”

I think: “That depends.”

I have some shrubs in front of my house. We’ve landscaped around them with bark chips and then I dug a little trench to place a series of interlocking bricks. It creates a wall to divide the shrub area from the lawn.

I love to go out in the early morning to wander around the plants. I pull the little weeds that try to make the bark chips their new home. They come out easily; they can’t get much of a grip. The real challenge is the grass that begins to grow in-between the bricks.

 

Day after day, week after week, I pull and yank, trying to get that grass pulled out by the roots. I have thought about it so many times; too bad this grass doesn’t grow about half a foot further south. That’s where the lawn is. I’d love that. Instead, I’m removing perfectly good grass because it’s in the wrong place.

Blooming where you are planted is a tricky concept. You can have a wonderful talent, like opera singing, but what if you end up in a Barber Shop Quartet?  Should you bloom where you are now planted? Not in my book. You should get the heck out of there. You need to find the lawn! You are stuck in the bricks.

When my children were small, I was working part-time as a nurse in a Same Day Surgery facility. It was challenging, but I loved it.

After a while, a weird thing started happening. I’d get crushing headaches every day I worked. It was so strange. I’d go to work and be fine, but leave like there was an anvil on my head. It was awful.

At first, I thought it might be ‘sick building syndrome.’ But that couldn’t be it. No one else was sick. Then it hit me. It was the environment all right, but not the air.

Our head nurse was not a good leader. She liked to play one person against the other, and listen in on private conversations. I knew all that, but I was a part-time employee, so I figured I could handle it. I didn’t realize that I was getting tension headaches from the stress.

I was not blooming. I quit, and the headaches stopped. The issue wasn’t that I couldn’t do my job; the issue was where I was doing it. Squeezed in between those bricks, no wonder I got headaches! I needed a pasture, a place to spread my roots.

The Lord wants to give me a place where I can bloom. But sometimes that field is hard to find, and I end up putting down roots in the wrong place. The field I’m in? Turns out it's not a field at all.

God is calling.  I need to get up and go, but only a few inches. Then I’ll be happy. Finally, I’ll be in the lawn.

(Full disclosure: I used a stock photo. But my front yard is nice too!)

Linking today with Wednesday Prayer Girls