The rain kept me out of the garden before Christmas for a few days…too muddy. The garden is banked into a hillside, so all I’d have done would have been to slip and slide around with mud caked to my boots up past the ankle, and plenty on the butt, I’m sure, from falling down. (Been there. Done that! Ask the kids!)

So….I went up a few days later to survey my glorious garden when the ground was not quite so soft and slippery. I went up expectantly….anxious to behold my four, rapidly expanding sugar- baby watermelons. I opened the gate, looked lovingly up the hill and saw…no watermelons. No watermelons at ALL! Not even the vines upon which they’d been growing! In total disbelief, as in, “Am I dreaming?” I got closer to the ground to examine the shocking situation. And there, to my horror, lay the telltale signs… strewn in disarray where once my precious melons had been flourishing. There on the ground lay small shreds of green melon rind…with large tooth marks in them. Upon further inspection, little paw/claw prints could be seen in the moist earth. AGOUTIES! And all these years I’ve gushed endlessly to guests about how “cute they are with the clicking of their little toenails on the driveway and the way the sun shines with translucence through their round, pink ears.”

Let me tell you, these rodents have completely lost every TRACE of cuteness, as far as I’m concerned. They have taken a fast free fall into the rat category here on Gingerbread Hill. Agouties are large, round, glossy, guinea pig like creatures who WERE cute when they’d stuck to minding their own business. But no longer. Sigh. No watermelon in our Christmas fruit salad breakfast. No watermelons at all…up there…in the garden.

So I was discouraged. Poor, pitiful me! I didn’t even want to GO into the garden anymore. I wanted to take my toys a go away! As a result, without anyone tending it lately, everything’s been growing like mad, and especially the weeds. Yet, wonder of wonders the pineapples, zucchini, carrots, and pumpkins are all still fine and happy, though crowded by weeds.The hole that those creatures got through has been repaired. (Actually, it was fixed immediately.) And just now I’m heading up there to do some damage to the weeds. At least that’s my plan.

In the Song of Solomon 2:15, there is warning to watch out for “the little foxes that spoil the vine.” Regarding the garden, I really should have been checking the fence for gaps or holes, down low to the ground, large enough for an agouti to squeeze through. Regarding the garden of my heart, this object lesson reminds me that it is really not the big, obvious things that jam me up in my faith/love walk. It’s the little things that are so easily dismissed as nothing, really. It’s the little things that try to nibble at “de vine” of God’s Life in me. Sometimes I’m too easy on myself with the little things. I need to be more vigilant and more loving in all the little daily matters and in the way that I respond to them: The little offences of my own, indulgences, disobediences, distractions, reactions, etc…including how I respond to those unexpected, little, testy things that come at me from the outside that I may not recognize as challenges to my faith. So I can learn a thing or two from those little agouties that spoiled my melons.

Back to the garden: Whenever I’m in the weeding mode, I consciously place myself in God’s hands for Him to do the necessary weeding in my life. As I pull the unwanted plants up from the roots, I pray that He’ll point out to me what things in my life need to be rooted out. Weeding is useless unless the ground is soft and moist. Rain makes it that way. Likewise, weeding my heart is useless unless it’s been watered with God’s Word and Love, and tended by the two-way prayer times we have together, He and I. I pray and listen. I pray with a pen in my hand, ready to hear. So this becomes a record of my prayers and the answers to them: The answers I hear in my spirit and the answers that unfold in time as I realize that my prayer has been answered!