Desert Primrose - oenothera primiveris

My father taught Sunday school for my entire childhood. Between him and my mother, I probably had them as Sunday morning teachers for half of those 18 years. But my father’s best lessons were always taught in the garden.

My father always said that a weed was usually a flower that did not know its place.                       

 He pulled some, he left some, he almost never used poison.

While weeding with me, he taught me the names of the plants, even the ones we were pulling. 

“This is called Deadly Nightshade – nuff said”

I played with that plant all the time – its little red berries made a nice dye.

“Jeepers, will it kill me?”

“Not unless you eat it – You are too smart to eat something called Deadly Nightshade – right?”

“Righty-O”

He almost always veered into the spiritual.

“Weeds are a lot like sin. You have to pull them out. Try to get the roots, or you are just pruning, and they will bounce back stronger. But make no mistake, you will never get them all. Weeding is a forever job. So is uprooting sin. You only get to weed your own garden. Don’t get all proud because someone else has more weeds than you.  You also do not have to let anyone else tell you what to weed out of your own garden. That’s your job.  And remember some plants that people call weeds are actually wildflowers. Nothing wrong with wildflowers, honey – they are a gift from God the shows that He loves us.”

I was smart enough not to eat poison berries. I was also smart enough to know that he was talking about other Christians, and preachers, and the doctrine of entire sanctification.

My father planted a lot of seeds. Some of them were seeds of revolution.

// posted by Peggy Senger Morrison @ Wednesday, May 10, 2023