pulling weeds

So we are the care takers of the 3 units in our complex, the yard work, the shoveling, the small maintenance (including the kicked out sliding screen door from our 3 year old neighbor's kids every month) and taking out the rubbish and recycling. Anyway there are many Saturdays we spend mowing the lawn, weed eating and pulling weeds. Yard work is NOT my favorite house hold duty but since it knocks off a few bucks on our rent, I put a smile on my face and I pull away. 

A few weeks ago as I was sitting and hacking away at lots of nasty pesty green demons  in the front of  the complex, I had noticed that these certain dandelion weeds, (the really big ones) had these massive thorns all around them, so the only way I could get to them was by chopping them off close to the ground and then pull them out by the roots. I also was surprised how the roots of my nemesis were not very deep and quite easy to pull out, even though they were massive. The hardest part of pulling them was the huge thorns around them made it difficult to get a good grip. In the middle of my conquest I heard the Father whisper to my heart about the weeds. "These weeds are  like the lies in your heart!" My first reaction to hearing this was "Oh great now I am one of those people who have some spiritual metaphor for gardening!" HAHA...but as I started thinking about it and asking the Holy Spirit to reveal more, it hit me. The lies that are contrary to the truth of who the Father says I am, they are like weeds in my life. They produce some kind of flowery looking thing but it just gets blown away in the wind. The root of the lie do not go very deep, or at least it might go deep but it's super easy to pull out, but there are so many thorns blocking the root, that it makes it so difficult to pull it out. The thorns are those things that other people get hurt by when they get close. For instance my husband, or friends. The Peddler always refers to these as "pricklies". It's true we all have some form of prickles... they are those rough edges that when people walk away from encounters with each other they might think, "ugh that was not fun", or "ouch that kind of hurt", or "man what's her deal?"

 My friend Robin talks about some of these lies as the  difference between facts and Truth. Sometimes we take thing in our hearts that are facts, but it is not necessarily the Truth of the Father. Here is an example-when I left my time in Whistler, Canada, I had been very concerned with the economic state of the United States. You see, I had been raising financial support for almost 10 years and I was not sure what I was supposed to do with the next season. I felt as though I needed to not ask people for money any longer but to get a job and leave the life of missions (the kind you have to raise financial support for). The "fact" was, yes the U.S. was and still is in economic struggle but the TRUTH is, God is my provider, He is the one that owns the cattle on a thousand hills, he is the one that gives and takes away. The funny part is my sweet husband has been saying to be for a few years, "I really want to be in full time ministry." Every time I heard him say it, I cringed, I freaked out, I would be anxious internally and immediately shut the idea down. My thorns were seen and felt.  I allowed the weed to grow that said, because the economic status of the United States was poor, I could not, and would not ask anyone for financial support to do full time ministry any more. I have been growing this weed in my heart for a long time, I honestly thought it was good, because it looked like there was some kind of flower and growth, but every time my husband and I talked about it, he got hurt and I felt like a fish out of waster.  My heart beats for people and I love ministry so why would I shut the door to it? Because that's what weeds do, they mask themselves as flowers in the garden of our hearts and keep us from being the beauty we are intended for. 

I am not sure what will happen with our lives and what the Father has in store for our future, it might be full time ministry, or continuing down the road of business, or even having 12 kids and living on  farm, who knows, but I do know this...I want to live in Truth and not in it's weedy counterfeit. It's pretty easy actually, just to ask the Holy Spirit if there are weeds in our heart, and He will point them out and pull them out if we ask, and always being true to His nature, he will plant something beautiful and true.