HOW happy we all are when the bright, warm spring comes!
How glad we are to see the pretty flowers blooming and to hear the merry birds singing!
In the picture, the little boy with the knife seems to be cutting out a weed. If any of you have gardens you know how the weeds spring up in among the flowers, Why is it that you pull up the weeds and try to keep them out? Some will answer, “Because they look ugly.” Perhaps some can give another reason. Yes, they grow faster than the flowers and if let alone they will soon choke and kill out the flowers. So you watch for the weeds and pull them out as fast as they come.
But I want to tell you about another kind of garden that each one of us has. In this garden the weeds are sins—naughty thoughts, words, and deeds. The flowers are good deeds. Whenever you do anything to please God, it is like a beautiful flower in the garden of your life. But when you do something naughty it is like a big, ugly weed.
And these naughty weeds not only look ugly, but if you let them keep on growing and spreading, they choke out the good deeds, just as weeds choke out flowers.
Satan likes to see these ugly weeds growing bigger and bigger, but God wants to see the beautiful flowers.
If you tell a lie a weed has started, and if you tell another the weed grows larger. If you keep on telling lies the weed grows so large and spreads so much that it chokes out the beautiful truth which God loves so well.
And so with everything bad. The more naughty things you do, the fewer things you will do that are pleasing to God. You cannot keep the weeds from choking out the flowers and you cannot keep the bad from choking out the good.
Ask God to help you, dear children, to keep out the weeds and let only the flowers grow.
ML 05/10/1903