Faith & Family
Sincere kudos to my father-in-law (who actually knows what he’s doing) for spearheading in recent years the care of any outdoor plants at our church. For several summers this was an undertaking I genuinely believed I could pull off, but—not surprisingly, considering the difference between annuals and perennials is indefinitely confusing to me—my own attempts were met with little success.
Imagine cultivating a garden and—albeit unintentionally— neglecting to regularly provide it with water. (Let’s just say that was precisely the mistake I kept making and the very reason my doomed-from-the-start Walmart Garden Center flowers never flourished in their prepared pots. Also, the deer liked snacking on them.) The following year, hydrating flowers still isn’t the foremost task on your mind and you fail in this area again. Halfway through the summer your geraniums and petunias turn brown—exactly like they did before. This pattern of planting and forgetting to water becomes little more than a perpetual, discouraging cycle, and in no time, you’ve tossed your cute gardening gloves into the dumpster and called it quits. This just isn’t my thing, you decide, brushing the dirt from your knees and determining to set your sights somewhere else.
Inevitably, repeatedly making the same mistake—like depriving plants of some basic need—will only yield the same (shriveled up, wilted) results. If you never change the way you’re doing things, how can you sincerely expect things to change?
Such an elementary truth, right? Now think about it in terms of your marriage. If you’re presently a couple stuck in that endless cycle of a few good days and a lot of bad days (if you’re in it, you know just what I mean), have you considered that changing your outlook could change the outcome?
