The kingdom comes in the weeds.

One of the advantages of being married to a botanist is that I see things which I once would have walked past without a second glance.

Harts tongue (left) maidens hair (right)

I walk past these ferns every day, growing in the gaps between the bricks. Every year the owner of the wall cleans it off and every they grow back, flourishing in the gaps, tenacious. Clare loves ferns and I am certainly coming to appreciate them in a new way.

One phrase that frequently comes up when we encounter plants growing in odd places is that

A weed is simply a plant growing in the “wrong place.”

But who decides what the right place is?

Viola`s

The violas in the picture above were seeded from a pot in our garden, evidently they were in the right place as they went wild and apparently managed to spread seed all over the place. We have been debating whether to try and transplant them into a pot.

The hart’s tongue fern has no business in a wall, and yet there it is, cut back every year, and every year returning. The violas weren’t planted between paving stones, but they seeded themselves there from pots and refused to stay in their "proper" place.

Both ofter unexpected moments of beauty, unplanned and uncultivated.

Herb Robert

During the pandemic while walking in a churchyard we "rescued" some Herb Robert which had been uprooted and was being thrown away, it is generally counted as a weed. I planted one in a pot in our garden. It flourished for a while but ultimately died. However, since then some more has sprung up gradually taking over a corner of the garden, that was bare concrete, bringing colour and life in an unexpected place.

Faith is often like this. It doesn’t always flourish in the well-prepared soil of tidy lives or carefully planned churches. More often, it shows up in surprising places: in the cracks, on the margins, where no one expected it and sometimes where no one even wanted it. Hope, like these plants, is stubborn. It resists being cut down. It grows in the “wrong” places and makes them holy.

What would happen if we stopped calling it a weed? If we stopped cutting it back? If we let it flourish, and even learned from its resilience?

The kingdom of God does not stay neatly in our pots and borders. It overflows into the cracks of the world, rooting itself in hard places, reminding us that God’s grace is not confined to where we think it belongs.

The kingdom comes in the weeds.

"Weeds" in broken stone,

hope roots deep in wrong places,

grace breaks through the cracks.