This past Sunday, I pulled weeds in my flower bed instead of going to church.

I realize that sentence may make some people want to send me a Bible verse, a guilt trip, or an invitation to their church.

Sunday was a typical Sunday. I woke up and went to the barns to feed all the horses. I came back home, but when I thought about showering, getting dressed, and rushing off to church, I honestly just didn’t feel like I was in the right frame of mind to go.

And maybe that’s the part I want to be honest about.

I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t having a crisis of faith. I wasn’t making some grand statement about organized religion. I just didn’t feel like I needed to rush somewhere that morning.

In the mornings, my house is in the shade, which makes it the best time of day to get things done outside. I looked at my flower beds and thought, Ugh. This rain we’ve been getting.

Everything was growing.

Unfortunately, not everything growing was something I had planted.

So instead of taking a shower, I grabbed my gardening gloves, my shovel, and my bucket and headed outside.

Scooby was supervising from the screened-in porch, because apparently pulling weeds is beneath his pay grade.

I started digging.

One weed. Then another. Then another.

And as I sat there, pulling things out by the roots, I started thinking about how much our lives can look like a flower bed.

Some things in our lives are weeds.

They aren’t necessarily terrible things. They’re just things that have taken up space without adding much value.

Some are things we once chose. Some simply showed up and took root. And some have been there for so long that we don’t even question whether they belong anymore.

Maybe you’ve spent years cultivating things because you thought you were supposed to—certain relationships, expectations, routines, definitions of success, ways of behaving.

Maybe you learned to say yes when you really wanted to say no.

Maybe you kept watering something simply because you had already invested so much time in it.

Maybe you kept trying to make something grow because you were afraid of what it would mean to admit that you didn’t want it there anymore.

And eventually, you look around and realize:

Wait. I don’t actually want this growing here anymore.

The problem with weeds is that they don’t usually announce themselves.

They just grow.

A little here. A little there.

And if you aren’t paying attention, suddenly they’ve taken over the flower bed.

I think life can be like that, too.

We get busy. We get comfortable. We get caught up in what everyone else thinks we should be doing. We keep moving from one obligation to the next, rarely stopping long enough to ask ourselves whether the things filling our lives are actually things we want growing there.

Maybe sometimes we need to stop and pull a few weeds.

Not because everything in our lives is bad.

Not because we need to completely reinvent ourselves.

But because we want to make room for something better.

Something that brings peace.

Something that matters.

Something we actually chose.

So no, I don’t know if pulling weeds counts as church. I’m not prepared to defend that position from a theological standpoint.

But I do know that by the time I finished that flower bed, I had dirt under my fingernails, sweat on my forehead, a pile of weeds beside me, and a mind that felt considerably quieter than it had when I woke up.

And maybe that was what I needed that morning.

Not another thing to hurry toward.

Just a little time to slow down, get my hands dirty, and clear out a little space.

In my flower bed.

And maybe in my head, too.

Because sometimes the things we need to remove aren’t the things we planted.

And sometimes the things we need to make room for won’t grow until we do.

So here’s the question I’ve been thinking about since Sunday:

What weeds are you still watering simply because you’ve gotten used to having them there?