We have an interesting and ugly yard. We live on the edge of the boonies, where almost all the streets are dirt roads that you can’t drive a car on. Needless to say our yard isn’t beautiful. In truth it’s mostly weeds. Throughout the summer our front yard looked really green because the weeds would grow crazy fast and crazy thick. My wife and I didn’t like the look of it so we decided to put down weed killer last week. I went out yesterday to mow the yard and looked at the yard for the first time since we used the weed killer.
Our front yard is now mostly dirt and dead weeds.
Though I was delighted l didn’t have to mow the yard because of this, I couldn’t help feeling sad that we lost our “green yard”. Even though it was just weeds, it looked green from a distance.
Then I started thinking about brokenness and our sinful strongholds. There are seasons in our lives where God spreads weed killer in our issues. Usually these times consist of deep brokenness where God is stripping us down to nothing, ridding us of all our falsities.
During these times, it’s easy for us to be saddened that we don’t look “green” anymore–those times where we look good, godly and alive from a distance even though it’s all fake and all a lie made from our strongholds. Dirt and brokenness aren’t attractive to us or others. There is a tendency to have a Egypt complex like the children of Israel did after God freed them. They forgot all the suffering and evil that was apart of their slavery and only remembered the measly food and life they had. Likewise, we can be deceived to think that a life with weeds is better than a life of dirt and brokenness.
We must remember that God not only kills our strongholds, but He does so to plant new life in us. We must keep our hope in Jesus — that we will be green again but at that time, it will be real! May we embrace God’s weed killer, even to the death of us, so that we might live in the power of Christ.
The Manchester Family 