God uses everything

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20).

Woven within the book of Genesis are stories of how awful things happened to God’s people, terrible things. And yet, we see how God turns the bad into something good and beautiful.

In the context of the verse above, Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, enduring some pretty significant hardships and trauma. Because of where this took him, however, he eventually became second-in-command to Pharaoh and was able to provide food to his family during a famine. His suffering positioned him to save many lives, including his own family, showing how God can redeem even the darkest circumstances for a greater purpose.

There’s so much more here, but one point to this story, and so many others throughout Scripture is that the hard parts of our stories can become so beautiful when we entrust the outcome to God.

God uses everything, he wastes nothing.

my mind as a garden

I like to think of my mind like a garden. In this luscious, wild, complex, reckless garden, there is order, chaos, and everything in between! 

I have to tend to my garden to keep it healthy, strong, and fruitful. If I neglect to pick off the caterpillars, or weed the Canada thistles, or cover my crops when there’s a heavy frost, my garden will suffer. So it is with my mind.

If I let shame, bitterness, and fear well up and root within my neural pathways, without tending and pruning with grace and truth, I will have a big overgrown mess of thorns and thistles and holey kale. I have tools to weed and prune those thoughts that harm, and tools to nurture and support thoughts that give life and hope.

My mind garden is a beautiful mess, and I work hard on it every single day. What I can’t do, I let the grace of the Father tend to in his own beautiful and redemptive way.

Part of this, I’ve learned, is to actually appreciate the weeds in my garden that breed a new kind of life and joy. Instead of trying to pull up what I can’t, I can sit back and just watch grow… and blossom.

fascination with flower weeds

I once went on walks with one of my clients around her neighborhood. Oh, the joys of in-home therapy!

One of the things my client would do was point out and cherish flower weeds — those plants growing on the side of the road that the average civilian (myself included) would fail to appreciate or even notice because after all, it’s a weed.

But to her, it wasn’t just a weed.

It was a lovely, bright flower, so resilient and persistent down to its roots. This weed was unique, it grew in some of the harshest conditions like the sandy soil by a traffic light scorched by the sun. She spotted yellow, purple, and white flower-weeds everywhere we walked and treasured each one.

I learned an important lesson that day: Weeds have pretty flowers too.

Boy, I learn so much from my families. Sometimes I think they should be paying me…

As I’ve been digging into my own story more, I’m learning to embrace, rather than wish it was different, those parts that were so hard. I’m learning to see the strength and resilience that came out of the darkness, the ruptures, the pain, and how those impeccable coping skills I developed along the way can actually be channeled for good.

This is me cherishing my weed-flowers. Those hard parts of my story I’ve wished I could pull up and toss away. The parts I don’t want to impact me anymore. The parts I just want to be done with. The parts I’m ashamed with and don’t want anyone to know.

But these hard parts have shaped me in some pretty powerful ways. Ways that I’m proud of and wouldn’t want any other way. They’ve sharpened me, empowered me, redeemed me.

So, if we judge all the weeds — those hard parts of our story — and go on wishing they were not there, wishing for a marigold instead, we may miss beauty that’s there. The weeds become much more bearable and even appreciated when we stop exhausting ourselves trying to pull them all up and allow them to just be, unique and influential to the landscape of our inner garden, the unfolding story of our life.

What do your flower weeds look like? How do they add beauty to your garden?