I mowed the lawn today.... and I have more to say about weeds.... I know... I know! I talk a lot about weeds. Kinda seems like all I do is garden, but with 1.89 acres to care for, weeds figure into the equation quite a bit.
Our lawn is actually a quite frightful sight right now. I keep praying that God will water it for us because moving a sprinkler around a 2 acre lot is not only wasteful it just might give a passing environmentalist a heart attack! Our lawn is more brown than green right now, and the patch on top of the septic hill is COMPLETE hay. We just haven't gotten much rain lately and things have gone a little dormant. The lawn really actually didn't need to be mowed except for the WEEDS! DARN WEEDS!
Out in the country we have these noxious things. They start out looking like a pricker plant, but in the BLINK OF AN EYE this stick grows up from the center of the pricker plant shooting up to about 2 feet tall in no time at all. So while our grass is brown and nearly dormant barely in need of mowing, the weeds scattered ALL over our lawn needed to be mowed and were nearly as high as the riding lawn mower. So I put the mowing deck on the second highest setting and set out to mow my weeds.
As I mowed I marveled at how what I want to grow (my grass) is dormant and near death and what I want to go away (the weeds) is thriving and vibrant. I also marveled at how as I ran over them, many of the weeds resisted the mowing blade having found solace under the tire of the mower until after the blade passed. I mowed the WHOLE lawn yet still there are a good 30 of those plants, mocking me with their 18" height.
How like life huh? What we want to grow (faith, hope, love, patience, kindness) has to be coddled and watered and fed and babied just to show the TINIEST shade of growth. And what we want to slay (greed, selfishness, pride, anger, lewdness) fights our every attempt to annihilate it. On a daily basis we have to cultivate what we WANT in our lives: pure speech, peace, trust and at the same time we have to fight the urge to cuss, fret, vent, and SCREAM! Left to itself, the lawn of our hearts would be just like my lawn... dormant, dead, brown grass with knee-high weeds thriving across it.
There is no easy way out of this dilemma. Only hard, back breaking work will bring about that which is good in our souls. Only daily Bible reading, continual prayer, and CONSTANT choices to REJOICE in our trials will give us a heart as pure as gold. Only minute-by-minute slaying our selves, laying down our wills, and FIGHTING Satan tooth & nail will get rid of the dross that floats on the top of our hearts.
My lawn problem isn't solved. I should probably get a TON of weed killer and go on an all out WAR against those evil little things.... But my war against the problem with my heart has new wind beneath its sail. Fighting those weeds encouraged me to fight my sins, to fight against the devil, and to rail against my own selfish desires.
Hope you enjoyed this little bit of John-Deere inspiration. Now go fight some weeds!
This reminds me of the chapter on humility in the Bloom Book Club book, The Fitting Room by Kelly Minter. She talks about calling the yard guys out to help save her lawn. They take a look at her yard and recommend tearing the whole yard up in order to save it.
ReplyDeleteI can so relate to both sides of this blog. Sometime when we are down, when Satan has hit us and we see no way out of the HELLISH pit sin sometimes takes over until the gardner(God wife,husband,Pastor,friend)help us out of that pit so we can see and feel the sun on our face and feel Gods clensing rain. It renews us feeds us gives us strength.
ReplyDeleteI can so relate to both sides of this blog. Sometime when we are down, when Satan has hit us and we see no way out of the HELLISH pit sin sometimes takes over until the gardner(God wife,husband,Pastor,friend)help us out of that pit so we can see and feel the sun on our face and feel Gods clensing rain. It renews us feeds us gives us strength.
ReplyDelete