Deep into last autumn, it took just one night of freezing temperatures to turn the colorful flowers in our front bed into a wilted mess. The seasons had changed. We were slipping into winter. Time to clear out the old.
But what I thought would take just a few productive minutes of yanking up the dead stalks turned into an hour of tugging and digging and hacking away. Those cute little plants last spring had taken up permanent residence, sending down deep snarling roots into the soil.
Not what I expected.
And as I hacked with the hoe and tried to loosen the soil with the spading fork, I thought about all those innocent habits and routines that have so taken root in my day. A bad attitude seems justified. Looking at Instagram is not a bad thing. And oh, I didn't realize how much time those emails were taking.
All those seemingly good things send down deep irretrievable roots far below the surface until it is hard to let go. A "get to" becomes a "have to." What is extraneous and seemingly inconsequential moves in and takes over.
What liturgies have I sown into my day? What is gripping my soul or entangling my heart? That which bears fruit or thorns? That which sustains or pushes everyone off the bench?
Our habits run deep. Choose carefully. They live beyond our lifetimes. They impact us. They impact generations after us.
In her book Liturgies of the Ordinary, author Tish Harrison Warren points out: "But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith – the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small – that God’s transformation takes root and grows."
The kingdom of heaven is
like a grain of mustard seed
that a man took and sowed in his field.
It is the smallest of all seeds,
but when it has grown
it is larger than all the garden plants
and becomes a tree,
so that the birds of the air
come and make nests in its branches.
Matthew 13. 31-32
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