THE WEED THAT GROWS AT OUR HOUSE

Just outside the sliding glass door of my study stands a noble little weed, no more than three inches high. But it has perfect symmetry with its main stem flanked by four lesser ones. It has a deep green hue and while it is petite it appears to be more rugged than dainty. In fact there is a defiance about it. That is why it caught my attention. I called Ouida to show her the unusual sight, and she told me she had already noticed it and was intending to show it to me. We have a way of pulling up the weeds on our premises, but not this one. It would seem irreverent.

This little weed is special in that it grows all alone on our expansive wrap-around driveway leading to the carport in the back. There is a hairline crack in the concrete and this little fellow wormed his way from the confining recesses below to the open spaces above, from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom. I see it now, fluttering with the morning breeze, all alone on a sea of dull concrete, telling me something of what life is all about. Not only do I admire its tenacity but I marvel at what nature does. If there is such power and wisdom in the tiny seed of a weed as to make its way through several inches of concrete to light and life in spite of immense difficulty, what are we to say of the glory and grandeur of the larger universe?

It must have been some such scene as this that led Alexander Solzhenitsyn to come up with a very impressive illustration of man’s struggle to be free. If the entire world, seas and all, was covered with concrete, he observed, cracks would eventually form in the concrete here and there, and grass would grow in the cracks. That is freedom. That powerful illustration speaks to me now as I study the little weed that grows in my concrete driveway. It is as if I can see in the gallant weed one of the prisoners of Solzhenitsyn’s gulag that refused to be dehumanized despite iron bars and concrete walls. It is one of the great moments in world literature when the Russian novelist told how it was while he was confined in a Soviet prison that he really became a free man.

But Solzhenitsyn’s illustration, like my little weed, does something more. It points to the encouraging truth that man is born to be free and that it is not his nature to be confined, whether by ignorance, prejudice, or sectism.

Nothing seems more out of character than for man to enslave another man, whatever be the nature of the slavery. Students of the American Civil War sometimes come up with an unexpected conclusion: those who owned slaves were often more enslaved than the people they owned. It was something like having hold of a tiger’s tail. We can remember Socrates’ dictum that it is better to be wronged than to wrong.

The systems we build have a tendency to strip man of his freedom and consequently of his dignity, whether they be political, economic, or religious. I admire the old Texan who could say, in spite of his long years as a party loyalist, “I am an American first, then a Democrat.” We all know too many instances of where party was put before principle. The basic political issue in our world today is an individual’s freedom or bondage. Marxism is a system that places the state over the individual, and ignores human rights for the sake of the state, which is always totalitarian in nature regardless of the nation.

But the most devastating slavery of all is our own self-imposed decrees. I just now read of two women who took Communion together and prayed together in the same church for many years, and yet because of an old grudge they would not even speak to each other. There is the secretary that a minister friend told me about who was overjoyed by the raise she received, only to be crestfallen when she learned that another secretary in her department received a larger one. Some of us are devastated by the slightest criticism while others of us are fearful of trying anything new or taking any kind of chance lest we fail. Others of us are tied to the fires of the past, nurturing their ashes rather than preserving their flame.

We are often our own worst enemy, as if we locked ourselves into prisons of our own making and threw the key away. This is especially evident in the area of personal habits. The person who can’t turn off his TV and do things that will give his spare time more balance is in prison and doesn’t know it, as is the one who, knowing what smoking is likely to do to his body, goes right on smoking, admitting that he is both hooked and licked by the lowly cigarette. While the Scriptures assure us that no one can actually tame the tongue, we can all exercise more control, surely Spirit-control, than we do. I have a kind of envy for the person who can speak several languages, but especially when he can be silent in all of them. We must learn to be silent rather than to criticize, as well as to be silent in the face of criticism.

While the church should be a citadel of freedom, particularly individual freedom in Christ, it is often not the case. While Christ called us to be free (Gal. 5:1), we are reluctant to do those things that keep us liberated from “a yoke of bondage.” These include a willingness to entertain new ideas and new ways of doing things, reading more widely outside our own circle, reaching out to a broader fellowship of the Spirit, and allowing (even encouraging) others to be different from ourselves. That is the idea of patience, as in 2 Cor. 6:6, which means to bear with a person in his right to be wrong as he searches for truth.

History is the story of man’s struggle to be free, which may simply mean his fierce effort to be his true self, what he is deep inside as one created in the image of God. As I watch my little weed standing defiantly and alone amidst bare concrete that may be what I see. It is doing what it is supposed to do in spite of all the hazards, and isn’t that what life is all about? As I watch my weed I think of the story told by Harry Emerson Fosdick of a wayward young man who finally found his way in an unusual experience. He was watching through a microscope these tiny animals that are born, breed, and die in a matter of minutes. He was impressed that while they have but moments to live, they still do their thing by breeding and perpetuating their specie. It caused him to think and finally to reshuffle his priorities. An amoeba or something less than that changed his life because he saw the hand of God at work. And so he looked at his own life and had a rendevous with freedom.

My little weed is so stubbornly and defiantly free that even if I should pluck it, it would likely appear again in a few days. But I will let it live and grow at my side as a reminder of what God does with such things as weeds and lilies of the field. And if with weeds and lilies, why not with us? The big difference is that we are free, not through the involuntary forces of nature but by our own choice. We have to receive the gift as proffered by our Creator. It is like Nietzsche the philosopher put it in his Either Or philosophy. There is no middle ground and even if we refuse to choose we nonetheless choose. It is either freedom or bondage. —the Editor.
 

The spirit and soul of all reformation is free discussion. Every reformation in society has been the offspring of free investigation. But to invite all men to reason and decide for themselves on all matters is always a dangerous experiment. - Alexander Campbell