Why are you tending someone else's garden and neglecting your own?

You are financing someone else's future, while sacrificing your own.

You and your neighbor both have a patch of dirt.

Same size. Same sun. You can plant anything you want in yours. Anything.

Your neighbor plants his. Waters it. Waits. Pretty soon he’s got rows of tomatoes, beans, corn, more than one family could eat.

Yours is empty because for whatever reason, you didn’t want to plant a garden. Maybe you didn’t know how. Maybe planting sounded like a lot. Maybe you thought you could just get your vegetables from somewhere else.

And you were right. Your neighbor walks over with an offer. “Spend time tending my garden every day, and I’ll give you a vegetable a week.”

So you say yes because you don’t have a vegetable and even though one vegetable isn’t a lot, one is better than none.

Now here’s the part I struggle with. You’re already there. Every single day, hauling water, pulling weeds, working the dirt until your back aches.

For his garden. For a single vegetable. While your own patch sits empty three feet away.

As a detective, I spent years reading people for a living, sorting the real reasons from the stories they told me. So believe me when I say I’ve heard every version of this one: