Weeds?

TUES., NOV. 9, 1999, 6:35 AM
FARM, STUDY

The essay you read yesterday was provocative, for it did challenge My frequent affirmation that I love diversity… but the earth scene is going in an opposite direction. Now… since I regularly affirm that I am in charge of this earth realm I’ll just have to explain all of this… on another beautiful Fall morning.

You realize, of course, that these were the projections of a paleontologist, whose perspective is centuries, and thus, at your present age, these observations would have relevance only if you should return to earth in a new body sometime in that projected future.

The theme was one of adaptation and survival of the fittest… the most adaptable. You wonder how I, the Creator and Sustainer God, shall deal with an increasing human population, one not satisfied to live in harmony with the other forms of life that I also create and sustain. Now… I don’t seem to be able to control the growth of human life, directly or indirectly. Or… is My approach one of letting the better adapters, the “weeds,” survive and be the human throng of the future?

You have had experience with weeds in your garden areas. They persist and survive when “your choice” of plants just can’t compete. Yet you also admit and realize that much of your lawn could be classified as weeds, but when you keep it cut and trimmed it passes as a lawn. The grass in your pasture could be called weeds, but after your son, John Patrick mowed the more obvious weeds down, earlier in the summer, the grass has grown back… “survived”… while the undesirable weeds have not. (And you wonder if the grass which is under that great stack of hay, across from the barn, will survive and be green again… or will it have died out. If it is a “weed” it may survive.)

My purpose in allowing the development of modern medicine is to insure that some humans, with fine minds and/or spirits but also with bodies that cannot adapt to modern threats, will survive and do My Will in some commendable ways. There are relatively few humans who are equally strong and adaptable in body, mind, and spirit.

But, in some ways, modern medicine is being over-impressed with its own importance and value. Saving and prolonging lives can be a high value, but the technological means… and the waste it produces… is another factor that I must consider. Along with lives that are prolonged beyond their own capacities to adapt and be even minimally productive. I recognize that this… the old and infirm… become a means for compassion, but with increasing numbers and other environmental pressures, I am less approving of the resources that are used… and wasted… in prolonging some lives.

Now that you are one with active cancer cells among those that sustain your life you have to accept that you are not as “weedy” as you have assumed you were. And then, in perspective, you have lived, in mostly good… to robust… health more than your three score and ten years. There is a time for all forms of life to “pass on,” even weeds. You can look around your place and see some surviving weeds, but they are no longer full of obvious life. To be the last surviving weed… or dry leaf on a tree… is of no great value. For everything there is a season… including for weeds.