Weeds 2

To date, I have well over 100 pages and close to 50,000 words strung together for my novel, Belabored, which I hope to pitch to hungry agents and editors at this summer's Greater Philadelphia Christian Writers Conference.

That is my plan.

It may or may not be God's plan.

It most certainly is not Satan's plan.

While some may protest there's no such thing as evil incarnate, I would posit that it stands to reason if there's a God, there has to be His opposite.

I mean, didn't Newton prove that?

Satan is not someone I spend a lot of time dwelling on, because I consider my time more productively spent focusing on the one who bested him at Calvary, and promises to best him again at the end of time as we know it.

Still, he's a force to be reckoned with, and not someone I'd care to go toe to toe with in my own strength.

Yet, that's exactly what I've been doing for the last month or so.

While my novel is most certainly progressing, it's also stalled in many areas. The writer's curse, I suppose, is an ugly conglomerate of waiting, procrastination, discouragement, and bad self-talk ("You, the next Harper Lee? Come on! Really? Your book's nowhere near finished, and you think you're gonna pitch it this summer?").

As I huffed and puffed behind our old-fashioned push mower recently (yup, we're one of those families), I marveled at how my sons manage to get a nice, clean cut out of those overtaxed blades. They seemed no match for the stubborn dandelion weeds that simply refused to bow to my wishes. Furthermore, I couldn't help but notice that the ones I did manage to sever were back in full force a mere 24 hours later (either that or they had some pretty fast growing relatives who showed up to mourn the loss of their kinfolk).

Now, that is just wrong.

I mean, when someone spends upwards of an hour cutting the grass on a hot, sticky day, she expects the lawn to look mowed for at least the better part of the next day.

Not happening.

So I got out there with my clippers and tried to tidy things up.

Then the rains came and, well, you know how that goes.

No matter how hard I try, those tenacious weeds aren't going away.

In the midst of those pesky interlopers, though, stand some pretty stalwart little flowers. I'm not a gardener (my idea of planting is throwing some perennials in where I have an opening and hoping for the best), but even I know the difference between a bloom and a weed. This is some sort of wild flower robed in virginal white and adorned with tiny little blossoms, none of which would bend their elegant necks to the blades of my mower.

Did you catch that? They hung in there, despite the cutter's best efforts.

The thing about mowers is, they don't distinguish between organisms. They hack up both beauty and beast in one fell swoop of their mangling teeth. So it really comes down to the plant's tenacity as to whether or not it's going to survive.

I'm thinking I have to choose whether to pattern myself after the flower or the weed. Either way, Satan's gonna come after me. But being allied with the master gardener gives me a distinct advantage over the weeds.

For more like this, check out: Morsels for Meditation...: Weeds

Morsels for Meditation...: Tenacity