Coming Up Roses

I’ve been doing  yard work again.  I don’t have much of a green thumb, more like a brown thumb.  I tend to pull more weeds than plant bushes.  Despite my lack of talent in the field of botany something really cool happened this last week.

To explain what happened I need to back up my story a little bit.

For the last couple of years a nasty weed has been growing near the mailbox.  Oh, you guys know what a mailbox is, you know the box at the end of your driveway that magically receives junk and the occasional birthday card from your grandma that always has the two dollar bill tucked inside.

Anyway, this “weed” never really looked like a weed.  Last summer it bloomed a beautiful white flower, but it also took over wherever it grew.  (It also made it hard to back out of our driveway)  So I decided to transplant this “weed,” still thinking it was a normal plant, to a more advantageous location.  But when I started to dig it up I realized the job wouldn’t be worth it.  What I thought was one plant was five or six different weeds.  This monster was growing crazy and choking out everything around it.

After talking to my dad, we decided to rip this weed out.  We dug and dug, for about ten minutes, making no progress.  Then my dad had a brilliant idea.  “Why don’t we rip the roots out with my truck,” he said.  “Heck yes!” I replied.  Two hours later, after a lot of grunting and other man stuff, we’d pulled the monster out.  The roots looked more like alien tentacles.

That’s the kind of weeding I like to do.  Honestly I didn’t expect anything good to come from it.  But then yesterday I went over to the mailbox for the first time in a couple weeks, really I only check my mail on my computer, and was shocked at what I saw.  The bush, which had been growing resolutely between the monster weed, had always been deprived of its nutrients because of the weed.  But now everything had changed.  A perfect yellow rose had bloomed.

Because I took out the weed the rose bush is now blossoming amazingly!

It made me think about how God works in our lives.  Sometimes he takes things away from us.  Sometimes those things are bad like weeds.  Sometimes those weeds even look good, but in fact they are choking out something that God wants to nurture in our lives.

So I have a question, what do you think God wants you to give up or get rid of so that you can experience an amazing blossom?

As we live spiritually we need to trust God.  He has a plan for us, even if that means letting go of things we think we need.  Let God help you produce roses, let him work in your life.