Recently, I had a neighbor tell me my grass looked really good and he asked how I got my grass to be so green. I laughed because what he didn’t know was that about six months prior to this conversation, I had a company come out to give me a price to take care of my lawn and I was told that it was not even worth trying to save. I was told that I needed to take it out and re-sod everything. Now some six months later, I’m getting compliments on it! That neighbor had no clue it was a total mess just months earlier.
I had two choices when the company told me that they could not fix what they saw in my grass. They said there were too many weeds and I just needed to start over. My first choice was to listen to the advice from the professional and start all over by replacing it. If I did that, I would have spent approximately $3,000-$5,000 and my yard would have looked great almost immediately. This would be the easiest but most costly option to get my yard in order quickly.
My other option would be to spend some time working on it myself. This option would be the least expensive, but take the longest time to get the outcome I was hoping for. It would require some research on what it would take to get rid of the weeds and what would be needed to give the grass the nutrients it needed to grow in a healthy way.
My wife would tell you I chose option two because I’m cheap. While that may be true, I also knew that no matter if I chose to replace the grass or fix it myself, I would still need to understand how to take care of the grass to prevent future weeds. I would need to know how to deal with the weeds if they popped up again and I would need to give my grass the proper nutrients and come up with a schedule to care for it. I could have just paid the money to replace the grass and then paid someone else to take care of it. That would have been easier. But, doing this would have put me in a position to rely on someone else to care for my yard and give it the nutrients that they saw fit.
As I was thinking through my neighbor’s comment and processing what it took to get my lawn to this place, God gave me a revelation. We all have a yard of sorts that grows something in it. From the time each of us was born, we were being fed different kinds of foods, different words were spoken over us, we saw actions of people around us with our eyes, we were physically touched in certain ways, and so on. There are endless types of things we spiritually and physically ingested as we grew up. There was likely a mix of good and bad, nutrients and chemicals. As our yards became fully grown, there was probably a mix of green healthy grass, large unhealthy weeds, and even some dirt spots where nothing had grown yet.
If you know anything about weeds, you know they are horrible little things and will take over your lawn if you don’t do anything about them. They can choke out the whole yard and the grass will slowly die. What most of us are tempted to do is get some chemicals to kill them or pull them out by hand. After all, this is the fastest way to fix it. The problem is, you also kill the good grass around the weeds if the chemicals you use are too harsh.
If you pull the weeds out by hand, it could be highly effective. But this is a long, arduous process and you will most likely leave some roots behind. In both cases, the weeds will just grow back because the grass has not taken up residence in that space. You see, weeds grow from water and sunlight just like grass does. If I just water my grass more, then I also water the weeds more.
The best way to get weeds out of your yard is to suffocate them with healthy full grass. To do this, you need to feed the grass nutrients, water, and sunlight. This means that the majority of your focus will need to be on feeding the grass, watering it, and allowing the sunlight to help it grow. If you only focus on taking out the weeds, eventually you will end up with a dirt yard and no grass. You won’t have a healthy yard full of grass - just dirt and no life.
The same is true with our souls. In our lives, once we are old enough, we have the choice of how we want to deal with our own weeds. Do we allow them to grow and fester by not dealing with them? Do we kill them but allow them to grow back? Or do we feed the healthy things in our lives and allow them to overtake the unhealthy and unsightly things we see as weeds?
The Bible tells us that on the sixth day, God directed us how to live on this earth and that has not changed.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28 ESV
The weeds in our souls are fruit from the root of sin, which is disobedience to God. If they go unchecked, they will take over our lives. They will cause destruction and ruin. Sin has the ability to control us when we get so focused on removing or avoiding it instead of placing our attention and affection on God. We forget to get the nutrients we need to live healthy lives. Instead of ruling over sin, it rules over us. Sin ruling over us looks like death to all those around us, but us ruling over sin looks like vibrant life. It draws people in like my neighbor and makes them ask, “How did you get your lawn so green?”
Or maybe it sounds more like “You were an addict! Look at you now.” “You were divorced and lonely. But now, you’re thriving! What happened?”
Imagine my same neighbor coming by my yard and seeing dirt or a patch of weeds? Do you think he would ask me anything about my yard? Why would he want to ask about a dead yard? Because my yard was full of green grass without weeds, he asked and I could tell him how to take care of it because I myself walked through the process.
Just because someone has green grass doesn’t always mean they went through the same process to get it. We all have different stories to tell when it comes to our yard. We have reasons why there is green grass, reasons why there are weeds, and even reasons and seasons for a dirt lawn of the soul. But, what each of us has is the ability to follow the process God has laid out for us. It starts with believing in Him, reading His word, obeying His word and allowing the Holy Spirit to water the nutrients of those words.
We get to decide what kind of nutrients we put in our yard. We choose whether to water it or not. We choose whether we are going to pull up the weeds or not. It’s our choice on how we care for ourselves. I personally want to take good care of my grass because I want to be in control of what it’s receiving. I want to rule over it well, knowing all its issues so I can address them myself. Then I can stand back and look at my yard with my neighbor and explain to him what I did to get the greener grass. And who knows? Maybe with a little help, his grass might get greener, too.
