Weeds
Our impact on our world is crazier than we think. It multiplies by time. Will we shoulder that reality with gladness?
I have a vegetable garden. It’s wonderful. It waters itself, and the soil is almost radioactively conductive to growth. But weeds like it even more than the lettuce and cabbage. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.
Generationality — Awareness of the Ripple Effect
The scriptures are filled with genealogies, and for good reason. The authors knew that each of us is a rock in the current of time and we affect what happens downstream. Each of us is affected, and each of us will affect. Men grow in the soil left by those before, connected forward and backward by the chain of cultural inheritance father leaves for son.
The past is cast in reinforced concrete, and the soil our roots are in can’t be changed. But we can change what happens here on out. Where the river is fixed, but we get to change the direction it is flowing. And we will. One guarantee in life is that we will affect those after us by the world we (do or don’t) leave behind and what we teach them. The culture they grow up in will impact their choices and what they decide to leave for the next.
In the greenhouse where lifespans last seasons or weeks, the effect becomes more apparent. Plant lettuce and let it shoot seed, and next year you have enough for fifty plants. The next, two-thousand-five-hundred. Weeds work much the same, only faster. They can resow in about a month. And that brings me to the best way to think about weeds while weeding. Every one, I often tell myself on muddy knees, is not one weed, but thousands, millions, given time. With the flick of my wrist, I have made an action that wiped millions of could-have-beens. Applied to the soft-leaved the thought is comical, but the idea strikes deep. How many things do we affect every day by our action or inaction? How many (to carry forward the parallel) weeds have and will we allowed to bloom and multiply their seed into the rest of existence?
The Queer Budding Specimen of Action
It is helpful to point out that generational thinking also applies to our actions. They are very much in the same league as our dear little weeds, though their harvest cycles are queerly unpredictable. The advice you sow this morning sprouts and blooms in a friend this afternoon or sits dormant for just the right type of frosty sadness years later, to sprout and show its wonderful flowers. And so in their strange way, our actions are far less predictable than tulips, and when they have sown their seeds and those seeds find the right soil, and grow and thicken, they themselves cause actions that cast the seed into the wind. And so generations go sideways and down the ladder of the family tree. Billions of action specimens pollinating and coming to fruition as they swell in a ripple effect around each of us; widening through everything we do and multiplying by time as they get children and grandchildren until the coming of Christ.
It Goes On
We are guaranteed, then, to touch more people than we could imagine. We affect the people we know, and those effects affect more people and then those people all get children and the ripple of affecting breaks loose into an ocean of water. Give it time and everything you do spreads like weed seed. And that is the great shock and realisation that compelled me to pen this. Each of us carries a mountain load of influence that we are led to believe does not exist. And the realisation of it has an acquired taste. The shock is a relative of that fever dream where you are in the driver’s seat and there’s no way of stopping the bus. What we do now has implications, ones our children and their children harvest down to the end of time. I understand why there is a temptation to put on mufflers and eye flaps, and bunker down into your own world, ignoring that everything you do flows downstream. It makes decisions so heavy, and life so real.
But ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Men have caused greater destruction by inaction than can probably ever be imagined. When we choose not to take up the responsibility we are given, we let it slide over our heads and crush our children. We are, then, like our father Adam, who gave up his responsibility for protecting Eve and shifted the blame to her when questioned by God. We blame the shortcomings of the men before us but shrink from loving the children down the time river as we love ourselves. The famous words from Gladiator ring true:
What we do in life echoes in eternity. - Marcus
And when we fail to consider our actions in the light of the breadth they spread down the river, we are blind to our own realness and relevance. We are the fever-dreamer or learner driver ignoring the road as it blurs by. The acquired taste, then, is the taste of reality, of taking yourself seriously, picking up the weight of responsibility and considering your choices with the brevity and thankfulness their impact requires. We are to look up from the flashing dashboard lights, steer as best we can, listen to the wise counsel of our father in the passenger seat, and grin with resolve to make the best of the opportunity given us. We’ve been handed real and far-reaching responsibility. May we gratefully step up to the plate and swing while there are strikes left. There’s no meaningful alternative.
Shoulder It
J. C. Ryle, in his Thoughts for Young Men, says not to underestimate the power of small sins. They, like the thrust of a spear, are all the more deadly exactly because they start out small. I would like to add that every sin, down to the smallest one, is deadly also because, like weed, it spreads. Leave it there long enough and they have choked down the lettuce and have jumped the redbrick wall to the neighbours. Your sins affect your loyalties and actions, and, through those actions, they spread downstream. Considering how far they will spread down time, shouldn’t we be fighting them with the type of ferocious fire of front lines standing upwind from billions of men who will not know us, but who will be affected by the choices we make today?
We should put on the weeder’s mentality; to take each inconspicuous, mundane weed seriously because it carries within it millions of unsown earth-chokers that will exist if you do not pluck it out while it is only one. Let us be like Christ who, unlike Adam, took responsibility for the billions of unborn and gave himself up for them. Let us lift our eyes beyond the horizon of our own lives, take courage in knowing that the torch this realisation has been held high and handed down by brave and selfless men through the ages, abandon our laziness and selfishness and pride, and, by the grace of Christ, start with the joyfully serious, determinedly ferocious weed-plucking of a people who realise the gift of real participation in a story that is rich with opportunity.