The Introduction to the Reintroduction of Jake Smith

This week my wife ….ahhem my wife and I decided to redo the entire flower bed in front of our house. First off let me start out by saying I have so much more respect for people who do landscaping or any sort of manual labor. As a musician and someone with such delicate good looks and soft silk like hands,  I was a little out of my element.  You have to touch the dirt? You want me to shovel rocks? Let’s just go inside and watch HGTV.  So we started the process…. The house we are now living in use to belong to my mother in law. The yard and flower bed have seen better days.  Months have gone by with no maintenance or interaction with people.  Weeds had made themselves at home in the now weed bed.  There are a few things that last forever twinkies, roaches, and ELEPHANT EARS. This picture was from 6 months ago so you can imagine the take over! 

So we began digging out plants, and pulling weeds trying to save anything we could.  We cleaned house..a side note: My wife has turned into some sort of freakishly determined woman, and will take out anyone who stands in the way of her accomplishing her goals.  Every time I needed a break I would look at her (who is almost 8 months pregnant) running circles around me. When I was to the point of exhaustion she was just motoring right along.  I would say things like, “is that the phone ringing?” Or the classic “man it looks like it’s getting dark.” Anything for a break!!…She would just give me the look and continue her mission. As if digging wasn’t enough her mom had decided to go with the light weight yet durable edging called BRICKS for the old bed. We were making a new design so of course those bricks needed to be picked up. OO OO me!!! me!! I volunteered with excitement. Finally we got it down to just dirt…Yes!!! Notice the bricks..it was a joy to stack those  if I do say so myself.

Has anyone ever worked a tiller? It makes everything jiggle when you use it. If you ever need motivation to get in shape go till your yard. By this time I’m pretty sure I couldn’t go anymore but we kept pushing through it.  I had my mother and father along side me as well as my friend Devin, so we weren’t alone. We then laid new soil mixed with peat moss to our freshly cleared flower bed. My wife asked me if I was finished with the bricks and followed that with now it’s time for the rocks. WOOHOO rocks that sounds like as much fun as bricks…what an amazing day.  It was 100 degrees that day. I have the weirdest looking tan (sunburn) ever. They make this spray lotion that when sprayed drips down your back and keeps the dripped part protected only.

The actual new garden part was cake compared to getting rid of the old garden. This time we used an actual light weight easy to install edging (THANK YOU LOWES) and made the design we wanted…we then laid the paper down and cut holes in order to plant the new plants. We followed that with some fresh mulch and WE WERE FINALLY DONE!!!

What an exhausting process! There are so many life lessons you could take from working in  your garden. I’ve heard the stories in the bible about the seeds and planting on the right soil. I’ve heard scripture speak of being rooted and staying rooted. However, more so than just hearing when I physically did the work I was able to understand the process far better. What a pain to have to start from scratch because the garden had become so over grown with weeds. Dry soil brings dead plants.  In life if we wait months without maintenance we will become so overwhelmed with weeds and junk.  We won’t have a chance.  We won’t be able to grow. I wrote  a song about that a while back. It’s called Stay. (itunes :)) We can try to plant some good plants in the bad soil amongst the weeds but we will only watch it become overwhelmed. It’s not until we clean up and add new soil that new life can begin. Here’s the thing, there is no secret formula or process that allows a garden to grow without being checked for weeds. Even though we did all this work  if we would let even the fresh new garden go for months without check ups we would be right back where we started. It’s nature. It’s our flesh. It’s like when you have a break through experience and you try to live off of that one experience. Things start to happen for the negative to make you look back and realize how far away that good experience was. A one time moment cannot sustain you for life! We must daily make an effort to grow, to change, to walk in our calling.  Maybe right now you are overwhelmed and dry looking for relief… A neat thing happened to us that day in the garden.  After we took the time and with all energy, effort, and sweat focused on removing the weeds, refreshing the soil, and planting new plants ..At the end of what seemed like the longest hottest day…. It rained!! (we didn’t even have to water the plants, what provision)

I love movies! I love things that inspire. I am capable of finding inspiration in areas that most people might not. It’s hard for me to walk out of a concert, a movie, a conversation without being inspired. Either by how bad what I just watched or listened to was, and how I didn’t want to be like that, or by how much it made me want to get to that level.

I have been wanting to write a post on this topic for some time now and at my last show in Michigan I ran into some friends who had already put my thoughts into a video. Perfect!!!

My friend Jason even went as far as to say he was tired of hearing people get upset by the fact that nobody noticed or said anything when that person wasn’t around for a few days, weeks, months. He said maybe your presence was just not missed. Maybe your story is so dull that it didn’t even register that you were gone. He went on to say if your life was a movie how long would it take before people were asking for their money back? Yikes!!

I just got engaged!! It was perfect. The sun was going down with the Manhattan skyline in the background, while we were walking across the brooklyn bridge. In my head I thought I saw white doves flying in slow motion behind us and every taxi that passed was playing our favorite song on the radio. I want to love like this! Like an epic movie! I want to love with the same kind of weight of love before people started to know everything about the way the world worked. I want my future wife to know that there is nothing routine, expected, or taken for granted about what it means to me to get to love her. I want this to ooze over into my day to day life. I think it is the way we were wired and yet we are told every minute, of every day, by every different avenue otherwise. I think we are all living to get to some far off certain moment and are forgetting the awesomeness of life RIGHT NOW! This sort of story is in our reach and I want to do something with my life that’s worth more than the mundane. I want a story worth living and hearing about. Do you?