For Wilshire Baptist Church
LeAnn and I have spent a good bit of time recently out in the yard cleaning up the flower beds. The weather has been relatively cool for June so we’ve tried to enjoy it while we can. The nice weather turned out to be an invitation to dive into the hard work of untangling.
A big part of what I did one Saturday was walk along the back property line with loppers and shears to attack stray seedling trees and vines choking out all the good stuff. We have a corner lot and don’t have a fence on the back and side street, so we’ve planted the side street with beds that create a border. Meanwhile, the back property line along the unpaved, grassy alley is marked by a low brick wall from the previous house and a variety of trees including pecan, hackberry, laurel and cedar. We’ve added shrubs such as leather leaf mahonia, fringe flower and cannas.
The problem is nature has added undesirable plants to the property line, most notably every type of invasive and overachieving vine you can imagine. I don’t know their names, but we have soft green spindly vines, sharp-leafed vines, vines pretending to be some sort of English ivy, and of course those native vines with sharp thorns up and down their thick stems.
All of these and especially the thorny vines are adept at climbing shrubs and trees where they ball up into big wads of green. The trick to getting rid of them – just temporarily of course – is to cut them off at the ground, and then while wearing heavy leather gloves, yanking and tugging and applying whatever muscle is needed to pull them down and out. If the vines have overtaken tender plants such as fringe flower, the process can strip the leaves off the plants you’re trying to liberate. More sturdy plants such as mahonia and hackberry will stand their ground and hold their leaves while you free them.
Regardless, what you find once you’ve stripped out the tangled vines is that some of the good trees and shrubs are not as full and healthy as you thought. From a distance, the vines have a way of blending in and creating the illusion of lush green foliage, but once the vines are gone, you see how sparse some of the good plants have become. They’ll look thin until the next growing season, but you can’t allow the status quo, because the vines eventually will choke out their unwitting hosts.
I’m talking plants, but I’m also thinking about so many other situations we find ourselves in where everything looks and seems healthy until closer examination reveals we’ve been deceived; we discover there is disease, corruption, fraud, harm.
The solution is frequent and thorough inspection. We can’t keep looking at situations from a distance. We need to get up close and personal to assess the conditions and make changes if needed. Sometimes that means putting on our heavy work gloves, rolling down our sleeves against the thorns and starting the hard work of untangling and removing.