Do you like weeding?

It's that time of year.

One of my favorite times of the year.

When I get to spend time outside beautifying my amazing yard.

It's a lot of work {A LOT}, but planting and nurturing my yard is one of my favorite things to do.

Over the years I have come to learn so much about plants - where they will thrive, what they will look like, when they bloom, and so on.

I have one flower bed where last year we started over and planted some new plants which are now this year blossoming and growing.

I was recently weeding in that flower bed and noticed some weeds I had not seen before (and I've seen A LOT of weeds). These new weeds look almost identical to one of the flowers I have growing in that bed. They look so similar that it made it really hard to weed. I had to really focus on looking for those weeds. I wanted to make sure I got them before they got too big and started taking over and damaging the beautiful flowers.

As I was out weeding, it dawned on me that these weeds, and all weeds really, are smart - they figure out the best place to grow. Some nestle themselves right next to a plant that looks like them in the hopes that they will go unnoticed. Some weeds bind themselves around a plant, some are full of thorns making them hard to remove.

No matter how you look at it, weeds are obnoxious. But did you know we also have weeds in our minds? These weeds are those sneaky, little thoughts we have about ourselves that prevent us from seeing our true selves.

How often do we stop and take a look at them? Do we just let them grow and take over? Do we let them wrap themselves around our true identity? Do we let them grow so long that they are hard to remove?

Over time these sneaky little thoughts really start to shape the person we become.

These thoughts can be things like:

"I never make the right choice"

"I just don't know what to do"

"I am not good enough to do that"

"I've never been able to do it before"

Can you see that over time thinking those seemingly harmless thoughts really start to change our perception of ourselves? How if we don't find them and remove them, they could end up covering up our innate beauty?

Don't let the weeds take over. Take some time to look for and find the weeds in your mind and see the beauty they are covering.