Get the Weeds By the Roots

God put Brad and I together to really love each other and to expose and pull the pesky weeds when they start to grow in our lives.

I despise weed-pulling, literally and figuratively. Our lawn is prone to thistles. If you catch them early, it’s not too hard to avoid the prickly stubble and yank out the roots. But those suckers grow fast! And when you ignore them for a few days or weeks, they get huge and painful to deal with.

You know where I’m going with this, right? All of our issues and problems in life work this same way. If we don’t remain diligent in acknowledging and dealing with them, they grow and cause pain, frustration, and damage to the good things trying to grow.

Get over it. It will never change this side of heaven. Be committed to seeing and pulling the weeds. Be committed to confronting people and situations early and often.

Dr. Henry Cloud is often quoted addressing this issue. “Your success in relationships, and therefore life, is directly proportional to your ability to confront,” he says.

All the people pleasers reading this are ready to stop. But please don’t. The point is that success in relationships is ours to create – when we confront in truth and with grace.

Brad is the nicest human being I know. He doesn’t have a critical bone in his body. I, on the other hand, have been blessed (?) with the ability to see what needs to be changed in just about any situation. We are probably both too far out in our respective perspectives. That’s why it’s good we are a team.

God has a way of recognizing our need for growth and presenting opportunities. He did this throughout the first year of our marriage. While I can’t go into the details, suffice it to say we were injured physically, financially, legally, and emotionally from attacks that we believe were completely unfounded and unprovoked.

Under those circumstances, I felt two emotions very strongly: fear and anger. I was afraid that my life would be destroyed in a number of ways. I was angry because I truly believed we had done nothing to engender such wrath.

It took months and months of “spinning” on the specifics to realize that obsessing on the specifics gets you nowhere and keeps you there. I had feared answering the phone, opening the door, or going to the mailbox. I had feared test results. I had feared fear. I had spent a great deal of time protesting, as well.

Finally, with the help of good friends, a lot of prayer, and the promptings of the Holy Spirit, we began to ask God what He was trying to teach us. This turned out to be a much more productive question than, “Why us?”

We learned that we didn’t trust Him enough. We were striving to achieve some outcomes and prevent others. Faced with the cold reality that we had no control over either, we gave up the fight for it. We confronted our situations by surrendering the outcomes to God. and changing our focus from protest to doing “the next right thing” or making the next right decision.

Confronting your circumstances by surrendering the outcomes to God and dealing with others in truth and grace is the difficult, but effective key to peace in your lives.

Come back! As always, there’s more.