“My life is a garden in which little seeds of knowledge and experience, love and friendship are planted. Depending on their soil, some will prosper, growing into healthy shoots which blossom and flourish. Some, however, will wither and die.

My life is a garden in which grace like rain falls from the heavens to quench my spiritual dryness. With this rain I am renewed and new life can once again spring forth.

My life is a garden in which weeds overtake and strangle me, and I must suffer because of them. Yet, out of these weeds comes a radiant sunflower; a beauty of all beauties which eclipses the ugly.”

Towards the end of this summer, as I exited my front door and walked past my garden I was enlightened with this little cheesy reflection. The metaphoric thought of my life being a garden came while I was marveling at a beautiful sunflower which was just about to bloom. See, this was no ordinary sunflower. It was a completely random sunflower, actually. Random, as in, it wasn’t supposed to be there and my entire family was shocked when it popped up.

That day, as I took in the beauty of the sunflower, I thought about its mysterious origin in my garden. How did it get there? Why was it there? In the past eleven years of living in my house and having that garden, this was the very first summer a sunflower had taken root. While I didn’t have a definitive answer to any of my questions, I did have the power of observation.

Yes, this was the first year a sunflower grew in my garden, but it was also the first time that we allowed a bunch of weeds to overtake our garden. It was really a combination of the huge rainfall and a bit of negligence on the part of myself and my family that caused all sorts of monstrous weeds to infest our front garden. It just got to a point where it was too hot to spend the day eradicating weeds and so the garden became reminiscent of the Amazon Rainforest.

This observation got me thinking about the fact that though the garden looked horrendous with all those weeds and they probably weren’t doing anything to help the plants we did want, the sunflower would never have been able to grow if we had been more scrupulous about weeding. Its almost like we needed to let the bad weeds grow so that the sunflower could mature and flourish. My parent’s opinion might be a little different, but I think that the beauty of the sunflower surpassed even the ugliest of the weeds.

Relating this to life, sometimes we need to endure hardship and hostile environments in order for a greater good to come out of it. So maybe we should be less troubled by the ugliness in our life and try to focus more on sustaining the hope that the best is yet to come. There is a sunflower just about to grow in your garden of weeds.