Roots

There is a particular spot in my back yard, about a 10 x 15 foot area that my wife and I would like to someday turn into a little patio area.  Right now it’s an overgrown mess.  Tall, hardy weeds; tough, little weedy shrubs; various grasses and all sorts of other annoying vegetation call the place home. Trying to keep this area under control is a lot of work.  No matter how many times I cut it all down it keeps coming back, often times bigger and hardier than before.  And if I fail to stay on top of it for too long it becomes a solid weekends worth of work.

One of the keys to getting rid of certain things like tall weeds, shrubs and other things is to get at the roots.  If all you do is cut down what’s above the surface, leaving the roots alone, then the thing is bound to grow back.

My battle with this piece of landscaping is similar to the enemy’s battle with us.  His ultimate goal is to destroy our relationship with God.  To do that he keeps hacking away at our blessings.  Does it ever seem like whenever something good happens to you that you hardly have time to enjoy it before something happens to it, or something stressful pops up in direct relation to it?  Those are the garden shears of the enemy.  And, just like I have to be with my landscaping, he has to be on top of them all the time, lest they grow and bear more fruit than he can handle.  It may not be what anybody wants to hear – but he’s not going to let up.  But the good news?  He can’t ever get at your roots, if your roots are Jesus Christ.  Which means those blessings will keep coming back to annoy the enemy.  As long as you don’t let him discourage you into letting go of those roots, then he can never achieve his ultimate goal of killing your relationship with the Father.

UNLIKE my landscaping problem, our blessings are not weeds they are flowers. Nor is the enemy the gardener.  He’s just a thief in the garden who has no legal right to be there. The gardener is you.  Expected me to say God, didn’t you.  It is true that there would be no flowers in the garden, or even a garden at all, if not for the grace of God.  But God gave us the responsibility of tending the garden.  We can plant the seeds of our blessings by ardently following after Him.  (…I will not let you go unless you bless me – Gen 32:26).  We can water and fertilize our blessings, and make them to be hardy plants resistant to the enemy’s shears, with prayer.  Prayer can insulate and protect our blessings the way piles of leaves insulate flowers against the frost.  Prayer keeps the weeds that would choke our flowers at bay the way fertilizer with weed control works in the natural.  Why?  Because prayer is the active nurturing of our relationship with Jesus Christ, who provides the right amount of rain and sun for the garden we are tending.  It strengthens the roots.  And the flowers are really just the visible manifestation of the strength of our roots.  If we protect our roots then we will always have flowers in our garden.  (Here on Earth you will have many trials and sorrows.  But take heart, because I (JESUS) have overcome the world. – John 16:33 [Parenthetical emphasis added]).

I Got Stung In the Face by a Bee

Well, a hornet, really.  I was doing some work on our soffits and gutters one Saturday.  In one particular spot where I had to do a lot of work, they had made a large nest just inside the rafter.  So while I worked I had tools in one hand and a fly swatter in the other, repairing my home and doing battle.  I only got a couple; my hand-eye coordination was no match for their dogfighting skills. 

When I climbed down the ladder to go work down at the other end of the house I thought I was safe.  After all, most creatures return to their business after the threat has left.  Humans are the only animals that understand the concept of vengeance.  Or so I thought.

Fifteen minutes later I climbed down the ladder on the end I had moved to and took a couple of steps toward my back door.  All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, an orangish blur swoops down from the skies and smacks me just below my right eye.  It wasn’t until I felt the first sting that I realized that I had not just been hit, but that it had actually latched on to my face.  It seemed like my arms would not coordinate properly as I flailed wildly, trying to smack it off of my face.  (It’s not so easy to convince your body to hit itself in the face).  By the time it was all over he’d gotten me about four or five times.  All in the same spot since he never left my face .  I’m still not sure if I managed to knock him off, or if he figured he’d owned me enough and nonchalantly flew off and returned home, no doubt to the enchanted buzzing of his infatuated female admirers. 

Reeling in pain I staggered into the house and sent my wife to the store for some wasp spray, while I dabbed my cheek (about 1 ½ below my eye) with Hydrogen Peroxide.  As I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, reflecting on how my day was turning into a scene from a Chevy Chase movie, I decided I couldn’t be mad at the wasp.  He was only protecting himself and his family.  If I could recall all the times in my life that I stung someone I’m sure I’d find I was protecting myself.  Protecting my pride.  Protecting myself from getting too close or emotionally attached. Protecting my opinion or what I presumed to be my rights.  The list could go on and on. 

And as I sprayed down the wasp nest, obliterating it and anything close to it that moved, I reflected on what I had heard said once before:  that people who hurt, are hurting people.  Was I hurting whenever I stung someone?  I think it’s safe to say I was.  And if that is true for me then I have to allow that it might be true of others who have stung me.  And so I need to show grace.  Even when – especially when – I am in the greatest amount of pain.

Dirt

     “Do you have something in the oven?”  My wife asked me one Saturday morning.

     “Yes”.

     “What are you making” She had that expectant half smile, thinking that I was maybe making something good for breakfast.
     “Dirt.”  The half smile disappeared and was replaced by a half quizzical, half unsurprised (because it was, after all, me) look.
     “Dirt?”
     “Well…mud, really.  But I’m hoping it will turn into dirt.”
     “By now,” she said, “I should know better than to ask; but… why?”

The reason was that I needed dirt for an illustration for a sermon I was giving the next morning.  We had just started preaching a series on growing through adversity; growing through being sifted, in other words. So in this illustration I was to take some dirt (very useless dirt that won’t grow anything – which my yard is full of), put a handful of larger rocks in it, then sift it through one of my mesh strainers from the kitchen.  And lastly, go by a new mesh strainer.  After the sifting there would be two piles:  A pile of useless dirt in which nothing could grow, and a pile of rocks.  I would point out that which pile we land in depends on our response to the seasons of sifting in our lives.  I would point out the uselessness of the dirt and go on about that for a bit; then I would point out the significance of a rock.  That people used to build alters out of rocks, that David brought down Goliath with a rock, that Simon was given the name Peter (Petra) which means rock, that Christ describes faith as a rock on which he will build his church, etc. etc.  I would then present the audience with a choice:  Do you want to be dirt, or do you want to be a rock.  It is completely up to us.

 Unfortunately it had been raining all night.  Although the illustration was for the benefit of the audience, I was learning a lesson by getting it ready.  The Holy Spirit had given me the idea for the illustration late in the week before.  But I didn’t act on it.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it (yeah, yeah - I know). There had been plenty of sunny days between then and now, and I knew it was likely to rain over the weekend.  When it started raining Friday night I thought, “Ehh, don’t really need the illustration anyways” (yeah, yeah - I know). Of course when I woke up Saturday morning the Holy Spirit burdened my heart with the illustration to the point that I couldn’t relax with my coffee until I had gone outside and gathered enough dirt.  

Except there wasn’t any dirt.  There was only mud.  So I thought about how mud becomes dirt: by being baked in the sun’s heat.  Well I couldn’t simulate the sun, but I could simulate the heat.

“Won’t that just make it a brick?”  asked my wife.  I hadn’t thought about that.  Surely there was more to making bricks than just baking simple mud.  Right?  Maybe, just to be safe, if I slow baked it, instead of trying to dry it too fast, it would keep it from hardening into a brick.  So I set the oven to 200 degrees.  About twelve hours later I pull it out of the oven.  It had dried! Into a brick.  So know I had to find something (I ended up using a screw driver) to break it into chunks, and then grind the chunks back into dirt with my hands. In the end it was a time consuming, messy process that could have been avoided had I just done what I was supposed to do in the first place.  So the lesson here is this: things – life in general – are easier when we do things God’s way the first time.