Heart Weeds

I predicted that my summer job as a landscaper for the City of Hutchinson would provide no blogging material. I stand corrected. Pulling weeds and planting flowers for the city turns out to be the best jobs in a while. It’s a wonderful, brainless job, a great place to recover from three years at college; the whole first morning I thought of nothing all morning. (At one point, I started to think about something and decided it was too much work.)

City flower beds come in two types: Bed Number One, where the ground is tilled, spread with compost, tilled again, planted, watered, mulched four inches thick, watered, etc. and Bed Number Two, where the hard ground is spread with mulch. Tugging at weed in these beds, I remembered how people compare sin to weeds – the smaller you get them the easier it is to pull them out. But this isn’t necessarily so. Nice, big tall weeds with a tap root slide right out of the soil, while little Bermuda grass’ shallow roots intertwined with the soil and stick to the ground. What makes weeding easy or hard was the soil. Bed Number One don’t get very many weeds. When they do come, they are easy to pull out; the soil is loamy and soft. Bed Number Two is too hard to weed and is hoed by hand. The mulch blows off, leaving the ground exposed to the elements that sap the moisture, strip the top soil, and pack it down.

The Lord reminded me that my heart can be like those two beds. If it is tilled by conviction from the Holy Spirit, watered from the Word of God, and mulched by obedience to God’s will, the sprouting weedscan be pulled easily. If my heart is calloused to the Holy Spirit’s reproof, my Bible sits in the drawer, and I live to please myself, it will hurt badly when the Holy Spirit finally pulls out the weeds.