Hi there, This is Delilah. Normally probably hear me on the radio at night, but this year we started a new way to connect with you. These are our conversations with Delilah, and in these podcasts, I can talk as long as I want. On the radio at night, I can only talk, you know, two or three minutes, because we play a lot of music, really good music, and I love, love, love that. But sometimes there's something on my heart, or sometimes I'll interview an artist and we
talk for ten, fifteen to twenty minutes. I talked to Michael bouobleat one time for over an hour. And I want to be able to share all that goodness with you, all that great stuff, and sometimes there's something on my heart that I really need to talk and it takes more than two or three minutes. And one of the things we've been talking about on the air and on our show, on our Facebook page in the little memes I post is gardening as a metaphor for life. I'm
a gardener. I love to garden. I have a lot of space now because many years ago I bought a hundred year old farmhouse and it's got acres of land, and then I bought more acres of land next to it so I can garden till my heart's content. But I have always loved being out in the garden since I was a little girl. I've loved plants, I've loved nature. I'm not a squeamy girl that screams when it's he a spider or a mouse, or a slug or a snake. Not only do those things not bother me or freak
me out. I love nature, I do. I love birds, and I love eagles and hawks. I love watching a spider spin its web. It doesn't creep me out at all. It fascinates me. I love learning about honeybees, and I'm very sad that they're dying by the bazillions and we don't know why. So I wanted to talk about gardening as a metaphor for life on this podcast. And if you're not a gardener, that's okay, because I think what I have to say will still resonate with you, because
it's really not about gardening. It's more about your heart and living a fruitful life. So we're going to talk about that, about planting seeds of hope and nurturing the good seeds in the Garden of your Heart. We have these podcasts and they're free because we have sponsors that pay for them to be produced. They're free to you, but they're not free to produce, that's for sure. I want to stop for a second and thank our sponsor, audible dot Com. Audible takes great stories, great books and
make them available for you to listen to. So you can listen in the car, you can listen as you drive, you can listen as you commute, you can listen as you go to sleep at night. Thanks to audible dot com and they are sponsoring this podcast. So when you decide to plant a garden, whether it's a vegetable garden, an orchard, or a flower bed, the first thing you have to do is prepare the soil. Sometimes that's hard, hard work, breaking up the soil, getting out the grass,
getting out the weeds. I have learned some tricks since I've been gardening all these years that make it a lot easier. One of those tricks is to cover the air that I'm going to plant with newspapers three or four or five layers deep, and then put rocks or bricks on top of it so it doesn't blow away. And then wet it down, and if you do that, the newspapers block the sunshine and it kills off all
the weeds and grass underneath. And then when you go to till it, because the newspaper is organic, you can till it right into the soil, and in that way you cut out a lot of the hard work. And in the same way, when you want to plant seeds of hope in your heart, you have to prepare the soil of your heart by getting rid of all the bad stuff. If you want to plant seeds of love, say you decided I want to be in a loving,
nurturing relationship. I want to have a committed relationship with a significant other that I can grow in love with, and you decide to plant that seed in your heart, first you must prepare the soil by getting rid of all the weeds and garbage that exists there. If you want to have a loving, committed relationship with somebody, that means you need to get rid of all the friends
with benefits that you're messing around with. If you want to have a loving, committed, nurturing relationship with somebody that is a long term, lifelong marriage or relationship, you got to get rid of the weeds in your heart, and maybe that's addiction. Nobody is going to be able to have a loving, committed, long term relationship with you. If you're an alcoholic, if you're a drug addict, if you're a gambling addict, if you are addicted to porn or
to promiscuity, you can't do it. You can't have it both ways. So if the seed you want to plant in your heart, if you are saying, you know what, I would like to share my life life with someone and grow old with them and love them completely, then you need to get rid of the garbage that is choking out the soil of your life long before you ever plant that seed, long before you can enter into a long term, loving, committed relationship. You need to put to rest and get rid of all that dead grass
and weeds where you're going to plant that seed. Maybe the seeds you want to plant are healthier relationships with your children. Maybe your kids are small, or maybe your kids are older, but you say I want to start growing healthier relationships with my kids, transparent relationships with my kids, same thing applies. Whatever is in the garden of your heart that prevents those seeds from taking hold and growing you need to get rid of first. You need to
get rid of that first. Okay, once you have dealt with that stuff, maybe it's counseling you need. Maybe you were abused by your father, maybe you didn't have a father, maybe he abandoned the family, or maybe you went through something horribly traumatic as a young person, a child or teenager, and you are scarred as a result of that. You need to deal with that, honestly. You need to talk
about it, You need to counsel through it. You need to find somebody to help you work through that stuff, whatever that stuff is, so that the soil of your heart is prepared to grow healthy fruit in your life.
You cannot grow healthy fruit of honesty, integrity, and trust when you have been violated and you no longer trust been violated, and you no longer trust people as a result of sexual abuse or physical abuse, or emotional abuse or abandonment, there is no way you can grow fruits of trust in a relationship until you deal with that.
Doesn't that make sense If you have been abandoned by a parent or somebody that you trusted, that should have been there to care for you and instead they were off getting high or messing around with somebody else or whatever, and that trust was broken when you were two or five or ten or fifteen. There is no way you are just going to be able to enter into a relationship and trust somebody and give them your trust. Life
doesn't work that way. So in order to grow healthy fruits in your relationship, like trust, like integrity, honesty, transparency, you first must prepare the soil of your heart long before you say, okay, I am going to open up and be completely vulnerable and completely trusting. First, you got to deal with that woundedness that happened that caused you not to trust. Does that make sense? I hope that
makes sense. So preparing the soil of your heart before you plant those seeds of hope, those seeds of love, those seeds of relationships, is vitally important. I know a lot of people that are having too much fun in life to settle down. They're having too much fun in life. They're players, they're traveling, they're doing this, they're doing that.
They think they're living the good life. But one day they're going to look back and go, Dang, I could have had a relationship, I could have had a family, I could have had a community, I could have people that care about me instead of of superficial friends that
mean nothing. So if you want those things in your life, if you want committed, loving relationships, friends that are there for you through thick and thin, that are there for you when the diagnosis comes in and you've got to face a battle that's going to take every ounce of energy. If you want real friends that are going to be
there and see you through those things. If you want loving relationships with your children and your grandchildren, with your neighbors, you have to first prepare the soil of your heart. Once that soil is prepared, once you've dealt with the past, once you've faced your character defects or your addictions head on, then you carefully plant the seeds that you want to grow on your life. You want deeper relationships, then you plant those seeds and you water them with your time.
You cannot have a deeper relationship if you're not willing to spend time nurturing that relationship. Just like a seed won't grow without sun and water, a relationship won't grow without time and attention. You cannot say I want a long term, lasting relationship with a significant other, or I want to nurture my children and then let poison get on that relationship. And the poison that comes into relationship
is jealousy, bitterness, lies, selfishness. The worst poison you can allow to get into your relationship is selfishness, bitterness, jealousy, those are poison too. But the biggest poison in any relationship in any family that I've ever seen is the poison, the toxic poison of self fishness. That's poisonous to relationships. You cannot let selfishness into relationships. You can't let it
touch your relationships. If you are more concerned with your appearance or your selfie or your glass of wine with your girlfriends, or you're going to a party or going to a concert than your kid's pta meeting or your kid's basketball game. If you're more concerned with your selfish pleasures than the needs of your children, that selfishness will
destroy your relationship with your kids. If you are more concerned with getting your pleasures met than meeting the needs of your family or friends, that selfishness is toxic poison. It poisons relationships. Jealous See is another poison. If you are insecure and jealous and controlling of your partner, checking their phones, checking their social media, telling them what they can and can't do. That's poison. Now, if your partner is a liar, liar, cheater, cheater, then why are you
trying to control them. You're not going to control them. All you're going to do is make yourself miserable and make them miserable. If you know you can't trust them, then walk away, hold your head high and walk away, or say to them, either you deal with this or I'm done. But trying to manipulate and control someone else's behavior is like trying to chase the wind. It's as foolish as trying to chase the wind or trying to hold a gallon of water in your bare hands. You
can't do it. It slips through your fingers. And jealousy and control insecurity, those are poisons that are toxic to relationships. Neediness is another poison that you need to keep away from the garden of your heart. Neediness and selfishness are tied very close together. People who are needy we call them emotional vampires. They suck the life out of you. They're like, need me, Please call me. Why don't you ever call me? Why don't you ever text me, and
they keep track, They keep track, they keep score. I called you the last three times, why haven't you called me? No, do not let that kind of neediness on your part poison the garden of your heart. If you're the kind of person that says, did you get the card I sent you? Did you get the flowers I sent you? I didn't hear from you, then you didn't really send that gift as a gift. You sent it with a
string attached. Hope you could reel that person in. Now that person should have good manners and say thank you. But if you give gifts waiting to hear from somebody, you didn't really give them a gift. You gave them something with a string attached. Don't be needy. Don't make somebody else responsible for your happiness. You are responsible for your happiness. If you are needy, that is a poison that poisons relationships, that poisons the good fruit in the
garden of your heart. So don't let selfishness, don't let jealousy, don't let neediness those poisons into the garden of your heart. Okay, Now, once the fruits or the vegetables or the flowers begin to appear, the roses start to blossom, the carrots start to make their little green tops, and the fruit is forming underneath. The next thing you need to be careful of in a garden are weeds. Uh huh, the dandelions, the morning glories. I hate morning glories. Oh, they're so invasive.
They choke the life out of everything. When weeds start to spread in a garden, they might fool you. They might look pretty at first. Buttercups look beautiful. I love them. I love their bright yellow, buttery color. But they choke out everything in my garden. And the weeds will steal the nutrients from the soil that the flowers need, that the roses need, that the irises need that your carrots are,
your tomatoes need. Those weeds will not only steal all the nutrients, they'll grow up right next to the flower or next to the vegetable and begin to choke the life out of it. Those weeds in your are weeds of bitterness. When you have weeds of bitterness or anger, unresolved issues in your heart, those weeds joke out the goodness in the garden of your life, and you have to be vigilant because they come back over and over again. Anger comes back over and over again. Unforgiveness comes back
over and over again. It's not something you deal with once and it's gone. It's something you have to be vigilant about. When you see yourself cursing your ex in your mind, when you see yourself saying negative things about your ex to your kids, when you see yourself being pissed off at your dad for what happened thirty years
ago or didn't happen thirty years ago. When you get angry because somebody you love betrayed you and walked away from you, and you catch yourself having those conversations in your mind where you're trying to convince them to be good to you. Those are weeds of bitterness and unforgiveness, and you've got to pull them out as soon as they pop up. As soon as you find yourself having one of those conversations in your mind, as soon as you find yourself being bitter to somebody who wronged you,
you need to stop. I stop, and I pray, and I say, God, help me to forgive them, help me to forgive them. And if I have wronged somebody, help them to forgive me. I don't want anyone to walk around with seeds of bitterness in their heart because I've wronged them. And I have wronged a lot of people. Trust me when I tell you I have hurt people on very very very deep levels. Some of them I can't make amends too, because to make amends to them would would be to open up a wound that is
best left and opened. And so all I can do is pray and say God, please, for every person I've ever hurt, If they are bitter, if they are angry, please let them forgive me. You have to be vigilant and get those weeds of bitterness and anger out of the garden of your heart. Every day. You can't let them grow. Some people will come along and they'll want to feed those weeds of bitterness. They'll want to point
out to you how that person cheated on you. They'll want to gossip and tell you garbage about that person that makes you feel even worse. You got to weed that out. You got to get rid of that seed
of bitterness that is growing in your heart. Okay, if you do those things, if you prepare the soil of your heart by dealing with and getting rid of the bad habits, the character defects in your life by getting rid of the useless relationships that aren't relationships at all but userships, and preparing that soil before where you plant the seeds of meaningful relationships. Then, once you plant those seeds, if you nurture them and water them with your time
and attention. Your time and attention, it doesn't take money. It takes time and attention to grow a child up. Well, it takes money too, but the thing that a child needs most is your time and attention. Put the stupid social media down and pay attention to your child. Put it down and talk to them, Ask them about their day, Listen to them, engage in conversations, build a puzzle, go for a walk, go for a height, go to the mountains,
go swimming. Relationships take time and attention. So nurture those seeds that you plant in the garden of your heart with time and attention, and then be vigilant to make sure that poison does not get in your garden, the poison of jealousy, the poison of selfishness, the poison of insecurity, the poison that can get on the garden of your heart and destroy it. And finally be vigilant about not letting weeds of bitterness come between those flowers of those
plants and choke out the beautiful life. That's my garden analogy to grow a beautiful garden in your heart, a garden of long term loving relationships, because, honestly, my friend, that is all that makes life worth living. There's beautiful places to travel to, There's fabulous experiences to be had,
there's wonderful music to listen to. You can spend your whole life buying yourself diamonds and jewels and gold, or buying yourself trips to the Middle East, trips to Brazil, trips to Costa Rica, trips to white trips to fabulous places. You can spend your whole life learning and going to college and getting more and more degrees. But when it's all said and done, the only thing that matters is love, faith, hope,
and love. And the greatest of these is love. And if you are not forming, nurturing, loving, healthy, precious relationships in this world, when it's all said and done and God calls your name, you're going to be very, very sad because you're not going to be able to take the diamonds and the gold the degrees, the trips, the photos, the Facebook post. You're not going to be able to take those things with you. The only thing that will
matter is love. I truly believe that, and I want to encourage you in this podcast, in my rape video show, in the books that I write, in all that I do, I want to encourage you to love one another that your joy may be full. Thank you to Audible dot Com. The sponsor of this podcast is audible dot com, the source of so many great books narrated brilliantly by authors
and performers alike. Discover a whole world by the books read to you wherever life takes you this summer, take a book along and many of them with Audible dot Com. Start a thirty day trial and your first Audible book is free. Visit audible dot com. Slash Delilah and thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day and do me a favor. Take some time out of your busy schedule to slow down and love summer. Slow down and lovesome, Live and love