Uprooting Crabgrass

It’s that time of year again--the time when invasive crabgrass exponentially grows and splotches lawns like stains of past spills on a nice carpet. It lies low growing mostly horizontally radiating lengthening tendrils that bend desirable grass over and smother it like a flat octopus with a hundred tentacles. Crabgrass drives me mad. I find myself seeing it when I close my eyes at night. I arm myself with my weed deracinating tool and spend hours on my lawn trying to free it of this blight. Yesterday, I was doing just that. I straightened up to rest my back and to wipe sweat from my forehead. Portions of the lawn caught my eye. They were parts of the lawn where I would NOT have to uproot any crabgrass. Thankfully! But, why? Why is there no crabgrass on those parts of the lawn? It is this simple. The sections of the lawn without crabgrass are those where the good grass is most healthy. The grass is healthier there because it receives more runoff from the rain, is shaded parts of the day from the brutal August sun, grows in more fertile soil, and has received the best care. I concluded what lawn specialists try to preach: The best deterrent of crabgrass or any weed is healthy grass. Healthy grass comes from good lawn care. I realize as my pile of pulled crabgrass clumps grew, that I really wasn’t helping those parts of the lawn infested with it. One good clump can produce multiple thousands of seeds that can lie dormant in the soil months before sprouting. In fact, I was probably hurting those sections of turf. However careful I tried to be, I uprooted good grass along with the crabgrass. All of the above flashed through my mind in a second’s time followed by the thought, “This is instructive of both one’s individual life and one’s ministry to others.” Foibles, faults, failures, and sins can sprout and create ugly splotches on a Christian’s soul, cancers on his heart, unhealthy toxins in his relationship with Christ. He can worry, jerk on, seek to exterminate these. But, the best prevention of blights in one’s relationship with Christ comes from keeping one’s heart spiritually healthy. If my lawn is not healthy, I cannot keep crabgrass from growing nor successfully purge my lawn of it. If my relationship with Christ is not healthy, I will be unable to keep sin, unhealthy desires, bitterness, jealousy, covetousness, discouragement, doubt, fear, and a host of other weeds from growing. I will fight a failing battle trying to get rid of those weeds once they manifest and mature in my heart. Myself being one, I know that out of concern for folks’ souls, a preacher can become as alarmed by the evident sins, failures, and faults in the lives of people whom he loves and ministers to as I am of the crabgrass on the lawn. He wants them, for their own sake, eternal souls’ sake, to be rid of those things. So, he attacks those “weeds” verbally in a campaign much like I wage against crabgrass. He zeroes in on a thing, grabs hold, jerks, pulls. Yet, he soon realizes, he cannot tell his efforts have yielded any difference at all. It is a liberating revelation for the minister to realize the best way to handle the weeds is to provide from the Word the sunshine, rain, nutrients, that will make the heart healthy, inspire good desires, and enable fruit to grow. This is all true in society too. The reason the splotches of ugly leftism have grown in our society and of destructive socialism in our universities is that our culture is not healthy, the home is not healthy, marriage is not healthy, and education dispensers are not healthy. We can rail against the crabgrass of our culture, yell and scream, and jerk at it. But, only a healthy heart, home, church, and society will be free of such crabgrass. Of course, any who take care of their lawn know there is still a time a weed must be pulled, weed killer must be sprayed, and the lawn treated for invaders. Yet, that does not change the fact that focusing on making the good grass grow is the single most important requirement to a weed-free lawn. Endeavoring to have a healthy lawn results in far fewer weeds than resorting to the singular campaign of pulling weeds. I have rid areas of my lawn of crabgrass by jerking it out with my deracinater. But, those areas have brown divots where the weed has been removed, and there are, despite trying to clean up, strands of shriveled weed lying about. Those areas are ugly. A person’s best efforts to rid himself of weeds of sin and lust, leave his soul and life ugly. God can make his soul a healthy, beautiful lawn; one that both is rid of weed and prevents them from growing to begin with.