It has been quite some time since I wrote a blog post. I used to do it almost daily. Not sure what happened, but today seemed like a good day to write.
So, the message at church this morning contained information about 4 general "places" that active church members would usually fall.....like where they are are in their spiritual life.
1.) Exploring Christianity
2.) Growing Closer to God
3.) Close to God
4.) Christ Centered
If the sermon was true, I've been in the second area for about 20 years. The pastor did say that sometimes people stay in the second stage for a long time. The timing of the sermon was great. I attended The Global Leadership Summit this past week and felt absolutely compelled to grow closer to God and to be part of the work in the world that He still has in mind.
After church, we went out to lunch and I wanted to do something more.....but a Sunday afternoon nap called my name. Afterwards, I walked outside to water a plant and noticed some weeds that I had been working on last night. I pulled some, but realized I had to get moving on something else. So I vowed to spend an hour in the yard later in the evening......working on those weeds!
I got a lawn trash bag, an old towel to kneel/sit on, and a big water bottle and headed out to the yard. The sun had gone down behind the house, and it was quiet. I found that a lot of the weeds were so intermingled with the grass that I really had to work at getting to the root, while preserving the grass. I thought about using gloves to protect my hands, but found that my bare hands did it best.
I thought about a time when I was younger and used to weed flower beds. It was tempting to just pull the green leaves/stuff off and leave the roots.....much faster and then I could get on to what I wanted to do. But now that it is my grass, and I love that it looks like a golf course and that you can go bare footed, I take a lot more care. I want to get those weeds at the roots so they don't come back.
I started thinking about the "weeds" in my life. There are things that are easy "to get the leaves off of".....to trim the appearance so that it "looks" nicer. But a quick jerk on the weeds leave the roots. If you don't get to the root, the weeds are going to come back. If you just go to pulling and yanking, you will mess up the good grass too.
I'm not going to keep writing, you get what I mean. I ended up with a half a lawn bag full of weeds. Hopefully I got to the root on most of them and I won't have to keep doing the same spots over and over. But I am sure there will be some that will come back. Maybe even bigger and stronger and meaner than before. But that's the way of life, wouldn't you say?
