“Now ‘tis spring, and weeds are shallow rooted; Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden. Shakespeare – King Henry VI Part 2 III.I.31

Little weeds overtake our garden in time if we don’t deal with them. Little problems become big if we let them grow. Little shortcomings in our character become ingrained if we don’t correct them. Little slights become a future of bitterness if we don’t face them and then forget them. In working though our midlife divorce and trying to get on with life, many of the things we have to deal with are huge things. They are huge from the beginning. Some seem to have appeared overnight. A husband walks in one day and says, “I don’t love you any more.” A seemingly content spouse comes in and says, “I’m not happy.” A lifelong partner says, “I’ve never really loved you.” Those are huge things. But maybe they all started with little things we didn’t address or were too busy to see or in fact, maybe they just came about full force without any warning or provocation at all. How you got to this place is not so important. But right now, if your divorce is sure and you are in this spot with no possibility of turning back, you are faced with dozens (or hundreds) of little things that bother you, annoy you, infuriate you, and can destroy you if you don’t deal with them. Just like King Henry suggests, if we don’t deal with the little weeds when they appear, they will “o’ergrow the garden.” That’s true in our life from now on. So nip the buds of bitterness. Pull the weeds of anger and fury and worry and hate and dissatisfaction and discontentment. We have felt all those things, but unless we control them here at the beginning and instead let them fester and grow and become a way of life, we will have no garden at all. So whenever something bothers us about this divorce or our new life or our new situation, let’s confront it head on and deal with it. Let’s make sure all of those troubling emotions don’t make us sad, self-centered, bitter people. Let’s make sure they don’t permeate our entire life and make us something we don’t want to be. I don’t want to be an ugly, dirty patch of weeds with no beauty or good in it at all. I want to be a flourishing, productive garden full of colorful flowers and delicious strawberries. So I’m going to start by pulling any ugly weed I notice  ... in my garden or in me!

“And please don’t toss this off as insignificant. It only takes a minute amount of yeast, you know, to permeate an entire loaf of bread.” ~ Galatians 5:9 (The Message)