From Thistles To Roses

"Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;" (Genesis 3:18). We may find it frustrating or tragic or unfair that instead of beautiful flowers and delicious fruits we seem always to be stuck with thorns and thistles. But however much we might wish for it to be different, this is our reality. Our first attempts at any new endeavor, whether it's making friends or learning how to draw or raising children we are destined to end up with thorns and thistles. We'll face rejection or misunderstanding with those we try to befriend, we'll crumple up the paper on which we doodled in disgust that the picture on the page looks nothing like the one in our heads, we'll screw up our kids in a thousand ways that they'll hold over our heads for the rest of our lives. This all seems rather horrible, doesn't it? If every time we try to garden we end up with thorns and thistles, we have only two options. We can throw up our arms in despair and give up gardening because every time we have ever tried we've only ever gotten thorns and thistles. Or, we can take a look at our mess of weeds, and we can find the ones that look the best, the ones with the brightest leaves and the least noticeable thorns and we can focus on cultivating those. And then, when the next generation of thorns and thistles crops up, we again find and focus on the best plants, and cultivate those. Every modern fruit and flower that we have was thousands of years ago an ugly weed, but across countless generations, the best versions of those thorns and thistles were bred and crossbred into the delicious fruits and the beautiful flowers that we know and love today. With patience and diligence, we can transform our thorns and thistles into fruits and flowers. We can go from only making bad friends to mediocre friends to good friends to best friends. We can go from drawing things that are unrecognizable to ugly to halfway decent to beautiful. We can go from actively screwing up our children to merely disappointing them to actually blessing and building up their lives. When we go out to our garden without judging it for not being full of lilies and roses and rare orchids, then we can finally look closely and find the very best of the thorns and thistles and work on making them even better. When we look at Michaelangelo's David or listen to Beethoven's Ninth, we are witnessing the product of a lifetime of careful effort to transform a thistle into a rose.