March 15 – “Dollar grass”

Chris and I had a contest yesterday.  We were working on weeding the front flower bed.  The forecast was for thunderstorms all day long, so we were kind of in a hurry to beat the rain.  Now it can get pretty boring just pulling up weed after weed.  Some came up fairly easy.  Just grab a handful and pull.  Others you had to finagle a good grip on and get under the dirt before beginning what became a tug of war with the persistent roots system.  Sometimes there was evidence of a real plant that Chris wanted to save and let grow to full fruition.  It was OK to pull up dead periwinkles, but if they had even a speck of green, leave it alone.  Problem there was everything looked the same to me, so I'm sure some up and coming periwinkles were assigned to the trash because of my inability to discern the difference.  The spiritual lesson in that?  There is often life in what appears to be dead on the outside.  Don't give up too soon.  Pray without ceasing. (1 Thessalonians 5:17)   So we came up with a contest, a game of skill mixed with just enough of a taste of chance to make it interesting.  It was a dollar grass roots contest – who can pull up the longest continuous string of dollar grass root without it breaking.  Those roots are unbelievable.  The little green silver dollar shaped weed is attached to a system of roots that winds in and under and through itself and any other root that might be in its path.  The green part comes up easily enough, but it is made to break off leaving the root system free to advance ever onward, creating a larger and larger base of operations.  That's why those little round weeds are so infuriating.  They can show up anywhere.  And do.  To get at the root system we had to dig and pull carefully.  Chris held up about a foot and a half one time.  So the challenge was on.  Frustrating as the effort became, I finally managed to get up to about three and a half feet – a new record.    There are all kinds of applications wrapped up in that mass of roots that is still buried beneath the surface.  Here's one.  Just when you think you have a handle on one sin in your life, and you can see what you have to do next to root it out, it becomes frustratingly apparent that what you see is not the same sin at all, but a brand new one you haven't considered yet.  Oh, it needs to be rooted out as well, so the process remains the same (confess and repent), but your self-satisfaction takes a major hit.  You can't get rid of all those sins without getting rid of the root.  And you can't get rid of the root without Jesus.   1 John 1:8-10 says, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives."   Father, pull up a good three and a half foot stretch of sin out of me today.  Amen.