Within the borders of respectability

Multimillionaire hotel/railroad magnate Henry Flagler began building Jacksonville’s Union Station as a freight and passenger railroad terminal in 1890.

Here’s a 1920s photo of the station in its heyday:

The last train ran out of Union Station in 1974, and a few years ago the city converted the building into a convention center.

During the conversion, construction workers disposed of hundreds of thousands of old bricks.

I salvaged a truck load of those antique bricks and outlined flower beds in our backyard garden with them.

Sunday after church Ginny & I dabbled in our garden. While she re-potted plants, I refurbished a brick-outlined bed beneath the crepe myrtle tree.

Over the winter a run-away vine had transformed this bed into an eye-sore.

My own fault.

I’d planted cuttings of this vine (which I’d found in a ditch) in the flower bed amid a stand of aloe. The vine produced hundreds of tiny white flowers which produced thousands of seeds which produced tangles of vines choking out the flowers we want to grow in the bed. The vine overflowed the bed hiding small garden statues and a birdbath; it spilled over the train station bricks so you couldn’t even see the boundaries of the bed any more.

I decided to clean up this mess.

A weed is any plant growing where you don’t want it to.

I moved out the birdbath and statues and I crawled around and around the bed with my clippers trimming back the vine enough so I could see the brick border.

I just wanted the vine to stay within the border.

Yet the vines covered a mat of dead brown winter leaves; the more I trimmed the thing, the worse it looked.

Time for a smoke break.

I glanced down to see a wolf spider running up my arm headed for the dark cavern of my shirtsleeve. I brushed him off thinking little of it.

I know a guy who drives a bulldozer. Macho man. But he’s deathly afraid of tiny spiders; the sight of one drives him into a panic attack.

The weeds, the spider and a phrase from the Scripture reading at church ran together in my mind.

The Scripture simply said, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

But I don’t want a clean heart.

I’m quite comfortable with my heart the way it is. As long as I can trim my internal weeds back enough to stay within the borders of respectability, they don’t bother me all that much.

I don’t want to be clean, just respectable.

I like me the way I am.

I have self-respect.

I admit that I may not have a clean heart, but I like to think of it as only a trifle dingy.

This thought reminded me of a passage I read last week in the diary (that’s what they called blogs before computers were invented) of a man writing in 1876. He met a millionaire who, “Gave me an interesting account of his early life and the sources of his success. His industry, anxiety to study, his resolve to instruct himself in everything connected with mechanics and machine making. Referring to his conduct when young, he said, ‘I was a very good lad, never a better — worked hard, studied, conducted myself well.’”

Those self-centered words could be my very own.

I too am pleased with myself.

I can’t see the garden for the weeds.

But as long as my sin stays within the borders of respectability, that doesn’t upset me very much.

I realized that the only way to expose the flowers in that bed beneath the crepe myrtle was not to just trim around the edges, but to clean the bed thoroughly.

To root out.

No half-way measures just to stay within the bounds of respectability.

The vine with the pretty white flowers had been choking out better plants.

Then I remembered a tale about an old-time Methodist camp meeting. A young fellow felt conviction, went forward, and knelt at the mourners bench. The preacher came to pray for him to “break through” but the young mourner said, “I can’t. There’s just too many cobwebs in my mind”.

The preacher called the deacons to gather round, lay hands on the fellows shoulders and pray. “I can’t break through; there’s just too many cobwebs clouding my mind,” he said.

Preacher and deacons prayed long and loud for the cobwebs to be cleared away.

An old lady on the front row could stand it no longer. She marched to the altar, lifted the young man up by the hair of his head, swacked his forehead with her open palm and shouted, “Lord, kill that spider! Lord, kill that spider!”

I pulled up the vine.

By the roots.

I suppose I can pray, “Create in me a fair-to-middling heart, O God.”

Will that be acceptable?

Is that good enough?

I suppose I already know the answer to that.