Thoughts on Weeding

Today I weeded for five hours at work. It was a lot of weeding. It was a lot of work. We put forth extra effort to make the flowerbeds near University Street look very nice because there will be hundreds of people seeing them this Friday at the Fourth of July Parade. In the middle of all our hard work, it occurred to me how unfair of a position we—the workers—were in. If there are weeds everywhere, everyone notices and wonders why we are not doing our job so well. If there are not weeds, however, no one takes notice or thought of all the time and effort the city’s Parks and Rec employees put into making the place look clean. Essentially, we get noticed only when people are unhappy, and forgotten when we do a job well done.

As I thought about this, I realized that this is a position Heavenly Father must find Himself in quite frequently. When things aren’t going the way we want them to, when He doesn’t answer our prays at the time we want, when His will isn’t our will—we notice what seems to be a lack of His hand in our life. On the other hand, when things are going great, we hardly recognize all the hard work He puts forth to make it so. Even when we are striving to recognize His hand, there is still so much behind the scenes stuff that He makes happen that we have no idea about.

 I’m grateful for the hand of the Lord in my life and that He still extends it even when I’m too busy or selfish or tired or impatient to notice it. I know that His hand is there in every single one of our lives and that if it ever seems that He is withholding it, it is only because we must first do our part or because He is giving us an opportunity to grow. Just like little children, we do not in the present moment comprehend all that God has done, does do, and will do for each one of us. We have much more to be grateful for than we suppose.

“Living as we do with a veil over our eyes, we cannot remember what it was like to be with our Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ, in the premortal world; nor can we see with our physical eyes or with reason alone the hand of God in our lives.” –President Henry B. Eyring (“O Remember, Remember”, October 2007)

“Ye cannot behold with your natural eyes, for the present time, the design of your God concerning those things which shall come hereafter, and the glory which shall follow after much tribulation.” –D&C 58:3