Make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison. Deuteronomy 29:18
The weeds in my rock garden have been especially pesky this year, in spite of my efforts to pluck away at the problem.
“You can’t do it that way,” a gardener-friend told me as she watched me casually pull a couple of weeds from a bed of bright yellow marigolds. “You’ve got to dig down deeper and get the whole root system, or that same weed will just keep reappearing year after year.”
She then rummaged through my basket of garden tools, pulled out a long weed digger, plunged it into the dirt next to a weed and dug the weed out, along with a clump of dirt. “This is how you get to the root of the problem,” she said, sounding like some wise weed philosopher.
Her words got me to thinking about some of the pesky weeds in my life. Take procrastination, for instance. On some days, I have a bad habit of putting off the most important tasks that I must tackle.
Finally, I force myself to start the project, but in a couple of days procrastination crops up again. If I stop and dig deeper around the edges of this habit, I find that it is rooted in a fear that I won’t do a good job or that I won’t adequately meet someone else’s expectations. What if I dig out my fear of failure and surrender it to God in prayer?
Thanks to my weed philosopher, my garden is starting to look a little better–and so is my life.
Father, help me get to the roots of my problems and surrender them to You in prayer.
