The Weed

Several weeks ago I found myself setting outside a Hampton Inn and Suites waiting for a shuttle to the airport.  There was a small patio with tables and chairs, so I sat down and began to take in the immediate surroundings.

The patio was encircled by flowerbeds and ivy covered walls.  All of it was quite manicured and beautiful.  All of it, that is, except for this one three foot tall weed that stood prominently in a bed of ground cover.  I could not help but wonder why someone had not pulled it before.

Now to be fair, it looked less like a weed, as you might imagine a weed, and more like a small tree that had found its way there by seed or by shoot.  I have to imagine, because the leaves were so much more pleasant than your average dandelion, that when it first appeared the gardener must have thought it to be a desirable plant and decided to leave it there.

Some time, soon after, this plant began to grow much taller than the plants that surrounded it.  At some point it became quite apparent, whether it is a weed, tree, or some other plant my lack of horticultural prowess prevents me from identifying, this plant did not belong here.

Why is it that the gardener did not pull it up at that point?

My guess, by then he had become so used to seeing it, he no longer recognized it for what it is, a weed.

This can be a very destructive oversight.  A friend of mine told me of a tree that took root in his neighbor’s driveway.  It burrowed its root into a crack in the side walk, made its way under the slab, and under the cinder-block wall.  How long it was there I do not know, but I have been in his back yard and have seen how the root of that misplaced tree has caused the block wall to heave, cracking and distorting it.

I wondered how long it will take for this weed of a tree to crack the patio I was sitting on. Maybe it will never get to that point, but my guess is that it already has put down enough roots that it is going to be quite difficult to remove.  Even when it is removed, those roots may put up shoots elsewhere in the landscape of that hotel, causing the gardener to take time to attempt to eradicate this weed of a tree for years to come.

If only the gardener would have pulled the weed when it first took root and sprouted.

It is the same with the weeds in our life.  Whether it is a bad habit, laziness or sin it is so much easier to eradicate it when it first appears than to get rid of it when it has had time to grow and send out its roots.

Trying to pull it out after it has taken root often only causes it to spread and sprout up somewhere else in our lives, leaving us feeling as it we will never be fully rid of it.

If we give up, and just let it grow we cannot predict the damage it will eventually cause.  Rather than pulling a weed, we may find ourselves having to rebuild the walls of our life.

A week later I spent some time at a friend’s house in Gig Harbor, Washington.  They live in a neighborhood where people take their gardening seriously.  It is a very beautiful neighborhood.  Each day my friend goes out to the garden to pull weeds.  He does not spend hours and hours there, but each day he takes a few minutes to tend to part of the garden, removing any plant that has sprouted that is not supposed to be there.  He said it is so much easier to take a little bit of time each day than it is to wait until the weeds have had time to take over.

Because of his diligence, the weeds never have the opportunity to cause the kind of damage that is possible if they were left to grow.

How is your life’s garden?  Do you pull up the weeds as soon as they appear, or do you give them time to spread their roots and become invasive?  What damage can you see from the weeds that have been left to grow?  What has been the cost?

It is never too late to pull up a weed.  Even if has spread, now is the time to begin to remove it from the fertile soil of your life.

One of the best ways I know of to begin the process is to first find a trusted friend and tell them about it.  It should be someone who is able to speak truth to you, and is able to do it in love.  It should be someone who is not judgmental, but able, because they have done a bit of weeding in their own life, to sympathize with your weed problem.

The next move is to recognize that not all weeds can be removed by our own effort.  We need supernatural help, and being willing to acknowledge the presence of the weed to God and ask him for help is the beginning of eradicating a weed from your life.

Taking time to talk to God and to others about the weeds in our life early and often is a bit like my friend who goes out daily to weed a small part of his flowerbeds.  It keeps the weeds from becoming invasive and destructive.

It is also so much easier than waiting until it is all overgrown.

The Artist

Today I flew into Long Beach from Seattle.  Due to a snafu in ticketing I found myself in row 21, seat C while my wife sat in 13D.  Needles to say, I did not know the young woman who sat down next to me.  She had to either be getting ready to start her senior year of high school or her first year of college. We traded a couple of polite smiles and pleasant nods with one another.  I pulled out the book I was reading and she pulled out a sketchpad.  We then both got lost in our own worlds.

My book was on the how God uniquely forms our souls.  It is a good read and easily kept my attention.  That is why I did not notice what the girl was drawing until I got to the end of a chapter and took a cursory glance down at her sketchbook.  I was amazed at what I saw.  She was working on the hair of what I first thought was a photograph.  I could not help but wonder why she was drawing hair on someone’s picture.  I took a closer look and realized that it was not a photo at all, but a pen and ink drawing.  

(Not Actual Picture, but similar)

She was clearly very talented.

I told her that I was very impressed with her work and I asked her if it was a drawling someone she knew.  She said no, it was someone she imagined. 

What was so amazing was how much soul the person she was drawing possessed.  I could see pain in her eyes.  I could make out desire for something more.  You could see in her face that she experienced hardship, the kind of adversity I could hardly imagine the young women sitting next to me understood. Yet, the way she drew the hair imaged a women who’s harsh expression was only covering up the softness of who she really was. 

All this was formed from nothing more than a black pen, a piece of white paper, and her imagination.

I must have embarrassed her because not long after our short conversation she put her book away and pulled out something to read.

About an hour later, she switched back to her sketchbook and began to draw again.  This time I said nothing, but at the end of each chapter, I took a glance over at her work.

The first time I looked, she had drawn what looked to me to be a caricature of another woman.  It was something I would have expected her to turn into an animated character.  You could make out the expression on the face and had a good idea of what the women would look like, but it was nothing like a picture.

A chapter later, I looked again and saw that she had begun to work on the hair.  It no longer had the feeling of a cartoon, but now looked real.  What I had imagined at first glance as blond flowing hair was now black. She had masterfully woven the stokes of her pen to create the illusion of light bouncing off the black curls.  Though the artist had hardly finished one side of her head and had yet to begin working on the face, I knew that in a matter of time the sketch that lay before her would look as real as the one she was working on earlier.

Rather than turning back to my book, I sat and studied her at  work.  I was amazed at how she patiently made the tiniest of strokes with her pen, one after another.  By themselves, they were just lines on a page.  However, together, they seemed to bend light and give dimension to the hair she was drawing.  It was almost as if she was not drawing, but scratching off a layer of color that hid what was real beneath it.  It was masterful and beautiful to watch.

As I watched, I could not but help make the connection between what I was witnessing and what I had been reading just a few minutes before. 

God too is an artist, masterfully working to reveal what He envisions our souls, who we really are, to be.  We cannot see the full picture.  In fact, it often looks to us more like a random set of scribbles on a page than the patient sketching of the lines that form a beautiful picture that is more real than what we can imagine.

As I watched her, I could not help but think that she is not the only one who had to be patient.  I too had to be patient.  If I refused, and turned away after my first glance of her second drawing, I would have been left with an image of a caricature, rather than the vision of how real the picture was becoming.

This too is true of how God forms us into who we are really to be.  If we get impatient, if we refuse to allow the Creative One the time necessary to draw the lines necessary to bring definition, realism and life, our lives may end up feeling more like a distorted image, a caricature of our real self,  than a photograph of who we were meant to be.

Maybe that is how you feel now.

Be encouraged.  It is never too late to wait for the artist of our souls to reveal to us what is real and seemingly hidden beneath the surface of the paper.

After all, he has already imagined who he intends for you to be, and like the young women next to me on the plane, he has the creativity and skill necessary to bring to life all that he imagines.