The Connection Between Gardening and Confession

This past week I was a Junior Core Member for my parish's youth group's annual Harvest Workers. During this week 34 teens partcipated in a variety of service projects including helping at our parish's picnic, serving dinner to volunteers of our program, painting houses, weeding gardens. Also during this week we offered up our parish's prayer intentions, attended daily mass and went to Confession.
Confession was a very moving experience for many of the teens. Many of them had heavy hearts going in to it and were able to experience the joy of Christ's mercy. I too went into Confession with a weary heart and felt the love of Christ all over again. It was the next day as we were weeding a parishioner's garden that I made the connection between weeding and confession. When you view a garden that is in much need of a good weed, the garden looks sad, messy, and generally bad. However, once you take pull out the weeds, all of a sudden the garden looks spectacular. I find it often hard to believe that all of the good was beneath all the bad. This is what Confession is. We all have such dirty souls that make it hard to see the good, yet once we go to Confession we are as clean as the day we were baptized. Sometimes it is hard to believe that all of that goodness can be beneath all that sin. Yet once we come out of the confessional we are like that clean, breathtaking garden.
I encourage you and myself, go to confession this week. Be weeded, experience God's mercy.