foxes and the vines

Eleven years ago this month we moved into our home.  One of my favorite things about the house when we first came was the amazing, beautiful gardens the previous owner had left me.  She had prepared such wonder and left the fruit of her efforts for me to enjoy.  I love to play in the dirt.  I don't mind getting my hands messy and every winter you will find rows of little seedlings sprouting in my windows with a pure hope that they will be strong and do well under my care.  But I have no green thumb.  Sometimes, I think just to bless me, the Lord gives me a good garden filled with beautiful extra things I have planted.  Much of what's there is simply the continued blessings from Susan's work long before I came into the garden and left my own foot prints in the dirt though.

About year three years in I started to realize that a particular vine in the cutting garden was getting out of hand.  The little purple flowers that covered it in late spring were really lovely.  But it was choking the lilac, the hydrangea, and the forsythia bushes and covering over all the other plants on the ground.  It was obviously a bully. So diligently I pulled and dug and yanked until it was minimal.  The following year I worked even harder to try to eliminate it and the third year I seemed to have finally erased the monster from my garden.  No sign of it for several years now.  Until last week.

On a warm, February day I trotted out to the cutting garden to clean up some of what I had left undone last fall and was amazed to find several very long strands of the variegated vines twisting their way around the poles, pillar, and bushes. I pulled one out and looked at it closely to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. There it was five years later creeping its way back into my life.  I pulled a few of the vines out but didn't finish the job.  I know I need to completely clean it off the bushes and other items or it will become a bully once again.  The thing is they are pretty vines with white and green leaves and small purple flowers when in bloom.  They are a beautiful ground cover.  I see it sold in garden centers all the time and I want to warn people, "It will eat up your garden unless you like to fight your plants!"

The thing is I don't think the plant is a wicked or horrible thing.  It's just something that needs to be tended and managed well and if the gardener hasn't time to do those things this particular plant should not be included in the garden scheme.

As I was pulling at the few vines there and deciding whether I would wrestle with them and have a nice ground cover this year or do my best to eradicate the little bullies I thought about Song of Solomon 2:15 which says, "Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that are ruining the vineyards, while our vineyards are in bloom."   Foxes (in my opinion) are beautiful creatures, smart and crafty.  But they will mess up the grapes growing.  And just like my vines popped up unexpectedly foxes will show up in the night when you are not there to guard the fruit.

Foxes - vines, both offered me a picture for those little things that are lovely or enjoyable and even perhaps serve a purpose (like ground covering) but need management and sometimes an outright fight in my daily life.
Those things that add something to the garden of my day but quickly take over my time and energy are my "foxes"  or "vines".  Phone calls used to be my time management nightmare.  I could spend hours on the phone praying with others, socializing, working the schedule to arrange get-togethers, and a million other reasons to be tied to that corded buddy that only allowed me so far and no more.  Now, I don't spend so much time on the phone as I do face book, pinterest, and email.  Some of it is just waste like the time spent on the games, relaxing but not much good otherwise.  Some of it really serves a purpose.  Facebook and email allow me contact with friends and family that I might otherwise never have. Pinterest, my newest time gobbler, has inspired me and stirred my creativity in ways that already have benefited my family and me.  However, they can be little foxes coming in and nipping away at the fruit of my time and leaving me with no time (wasted fruit).  Or like the vine, choking the life out of other areas of life, such as finances (something has to pay for the creativity).

While each of those particular activities have a purpose and are useful for me, they are also potentially threatening to my day, my time, and to what God has called me to do.  If I spend the day or the whole morning whittling away on one of these instead of caring for the family He has given me; or if I am pinning away on Pinterest instead of putting some of that new found creativity to use for my friends and family; if I waste the time reading all 300 or so friends statuses or playing games with my buddies instead of working on the writing that needs my attention I have allowed the pretty little vines to climb all over my day and they will begin to squeeze out those other and more important areas of life.

Perhaps you are not tempted by the things I mentioned.  That's ok and good for you! I bet, though, you have something that pulls at your attention and threatens to run your day for you.  Maybe it's television or talk radio, or noodling around with an instrument, or reading when you should be doing, or doing when you should be reading.  Whatever it is catch the foxes.  Scripture doesn't say kill the foxes, but catch the foxes, capture them and get them out of the vineyard where they don't belong. Manage your garden.  What are your foxes?  Do you have vines trying to bully their way into your day?