Weeds Have So Much to Say

Thought I'd spend a couple days visiting my journey to the prayer chapel from a few years back...and when I last wrote about it, I had gone to the chapel for my second visit {of seven} and found it was closed for the day. I relocated to my yard for that particular day...

Squirming in the chair drew my focus out of the yard and onto the scene in front of my eyes.  The summer before, I’d tried my hand at a very low-budget landscaping job.  The area immediately surrounding my porch refuses to grow grass, because the rainfall from the awning above it creates a trench and kills all purposeful vegetation.  Rest assured that the weeds survive – heartily – but all grass dies.  So in an attempt to brighten the back porch, I carefully cut and laid strips of that black sheeting that is supposed to prevent weed growth.  And then shovelful by heavy shovelful, I deposited gravel over the top of it.  I randomly interspersed potted plants and tiki torches and pronounced it good. 

But as I squirmed in the green plastic chair that Tuesday, I concluded that either the black sheeting does not, in fact, kill all weeds, or the installer of the black sheeting did a very poor installation job.  Because a shocking amount of the forbidden foliage had sprouted – peeking out here and there – without my permission. 

I could not have been in a more uncomfortable situation.  Not only was my mind receiving a lesson on the merits of a fear-free life, but my eyes were now consumed with the glaring green weeds.  I think God knew that unless He freed me to pull some weeds as He chatted, He was not going to have my best attention.  I would only catch every fifth word as I tried to drown out the “PULL ME!!!  PULL ME!!!” shouted by the offensive little weeds.

So I slid down onto the ground (skirt, heels, and all!) and began to pull out the weeds.  One of the first ones I grabbed was a big one, and I yanked hard and pulled it out by the root.  When I did, the rocks all around it went flying – what a mess!  Even as I threw the big, nasty weed into the grass to be chewed up and spit out by the mower later, I sensed a lesson coming on.  See?  God said.  Sometimes when you weed something from your life, your nice, neat piles – which you are so fond of – become disrupted. 

I began to think about my life right at that moment.  I thought of the ex-boyfriend from years ago that still held such an enormous space in my heart and of the hard work I was going through right then to weed that relationship from my life.  Yes, I would say that to pull that out by the roots was disrupting many areas of my life.  I thought of my job and the unrest that settled over my heart regarding it – and how even the thought of moving to a new job had the potential to alter everything.  Even the thought of releasing the grip that fear itself had on me…that would interrupt some very tidy piles in my life.  Because even though the fear wasn’t healthy, it had its place in the cycle of my daily routine. 

I moved down the porch a few feet and tugged hard at another big weed.  It refused to budge.  How had I not gotten rid of this one before?  Like when it was a baby?  It finally came out, root and all, and along with it came a clump of dirt and several rocks.  I looked down to find a gaping hole left where once had been a nicely arranged pile of white rocks.  It would have been so much easier to take care of this one when it was little instead of waiting until it was deeply rooted.  Look at the wound left behind now.

How very much like my life that was.  If only I’d taken care of fear’s stronghold over my life when it was such a tiny problem.  To weed it out now was going to leave a noticeable wound in my heart.  Perhaps it’s a good time to look ahead…think about weeding out other problems before they became so huge that they too, left a gaping hole next to this one.

The bigger my pile of pulled weeds grew, the more I saw.  Ones that hadn’t seemed visible at all in light of the bigger weeds hiding it now glared as they became the one bit of green in a sea of white rocks.  And so it will be with you.  As you purify your life, you will notice more and more areas that need work.  But don’t stop the purification process with the big problems.  Continue working until you can’t see any more issues.

This had the potential to take much longer than seven weeks.

As I kept pulling weeds, I glared at the black sheeting. “Weren’t you supposed to prevent weed pulling festivals?”  I grumbled under my breath.  And then God again:  Even when you think you have good protection in place over your heart, things can sneak up on you.  Always be aware that Satan can bring up evil through a crack you don’t even see.

Lunch was nearly over when I felt satisfied that all weeds were present and accounted for in the discard pile in the yard.  I stood up, wiped the dirt off my hands and imagined that the lessons had concluded for the day.

Had I learned nothing?