I looked out the dining room window and there he was again. The man with the white hat and the white bucket. Across the street he was on his knees in his front yard.  I knew he would be there for hours. I watched our neighbor pull weeds from his yard and put them in his bucket, over and over again.  He hates weeds!

Sometimes he and I will get into little arguments when he walks over to my yard and points out the weeds mixed in with the grass.  I let him know, “Richard, it’s just grass! Who cares? You know the weeds are going to come back. I don’t have time to deal with this. Isn’t it fleeting pulling weeds out of your yard?!”  

One day he got so disgusted, he whipped out his weed eater and wiped out a whole area of weeds in his front yard, but he also wiped out a section of grass in the same area. It looked like he needed to add sand and he would have a sand trap!  “Golf anyone?”

Weeds are relentless.  As soon as I yank them up from our flower garden, I swear they are back in full force in a week.  I bend down and pull them up again. It’s like they want to take over the SunPatiens and the French Marigolds.  It is a fight.

There is something else that wants to gain control and it ain’t easy yanking up.  It wants to overtake our very souls. I know, I know it is an ancient word and it’s not vogue to speak it.  But this is the thing, it still exists. It’s interesting to discover various synonyms that describe it. Some call it pride.  Some call it lust. Others call it a shortcoming, an offense or a vice.

You may even have heard it called a violation or blasphemy or wickedness. Regardless, it will choke the very life out of you. Isn’t that why Paul said the wages of sin is spiritual death? Peter even warns us to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against our soul.  It’s a fight!

Most people are quick to confess their transgressions and swift to repeat them.  Can you root out sin? If your sin has a history or a pattern or even a stronghold in your life can you go back and dig up its beginning?  Author John Eldredge offers some help from Free To Live, “Ask the Spirit of God to search you and to reveal where the root of the sin got in.  As he does, bring each event under the blood of Jesus; renounce it, renounce “presenting” yourself to this specific sin; break with it, and ask Christ to cleanse you there.”

It is a process.  With the help of my Therapist, I was able to go back in time when I was a young boy and uncover stuff so I could move forward.  What needs to be weeded out in your life?

pictures courtesy of “Nelson & His Nikon”