Well, it’s that time of year. The sun is showing itself a little bit more depending on where you live, the grass is back to being green, the trees are blooming… color is slowly coming back everywhere. Life definitely has a brighter feel right now.

I was excited to see that even my flowers are starting to bloom again in my flower bed – ooh, but so has something else. And it’s starting to take over!

WEEDS. Lots of ugly, suffocating, threatening weeds.

I admit it. I’ve been ignoring those weeds for a while now. Making excuses. “It’s too cold outside.” “It keeps raining.” “I’m trying to avoid a sinus attack.” “I just don’t have time.”

But – and I know it’s hard to believe – those weeds haven’t gone away. They haven’t listened to my excuses and gotten the hint that they just need to take care of themselves. In fact, they just keep GROWING. Getting longer, getting taller, and literally spreading out over my entire flower bed like, uh, well, weeds.

They’re not going away until I deal with them. The same can apply to life.

We can see a lot of weeds grow in our lives and our relationships, can’t we? If we’re going through deployments, we can see weeds of fear and distrust and despair and weariness. Or we may have weeds sprouting up that are causing problems in relationships with friends. Misunderstandings. Hurt feelings. Things said you wish you could take back. The same can happen with our marriages. Weeds of frustration, lack of communication, anger, all of these can hamper our growth as couples. Maybe we find weeds growing up in our own relationships with God, making it even harder to feel close to him.

So how do we deal with the weeds?

We make time to dig in the dirt.

If I want those weeds gone, I’ve got to physically go out to the flower bed and start getting to work. I’ve got to have my tools out, my gloves on, and an attitude that says “Let’s do it!” It’s the same basic setup for working on weeds in our relationships and faith. I have to make time. I have to believe this is important enough to work on. I have to be willing to get a little uncomfortable, a little dirty, a little exposed even (I mean, really, when you’re weeding a garden, it’s not your face facing the road, right?) We have to be willing and make ourselves available, asking God to help us as we get ready for the next step, which is…

We get rid of the weeds.

Proverbs 22:8 says “Whoever sows sin, reaps weeds and bullying anger sputters into nothing.”

I have to confess. I had a really bad attitude with my husband yesterday. It started with me making excuses for why I was so irritated, justifying my attitude with what HE was doing or not doing, and then those ugly weeds came out in full force with anger and selfish motives. I had to look at what was going on around the thing I was putting squarely to blame on my husband and I realized that it wasn’t necessarily all him, but it was mostly me. (Don’t you HATE having to admit that!) I was focusing squarely on what I wanted and not what we wanted as a couple or as a family.

So to get rid of those weeds I had suddenly allowed to start growing between me and him, I had to acknowledge what I was doing wrong. I had to talk to him about how I was feeling – not in accusatory tones, but just acknowledging what I was thinking and why. And slowly those weeds started coming out. We talked. We talked some more. And our little garden of almost 10 years of marriage looks a whole lot nicer right now. But, we can’t just leave it at that.

We do preventative maintenance.

Anyone who has a yard or flowers knows that you can’t just weed once and be done with it. It’s a weekly, sometimes daily, effort. Sometimes it helps to add sprays or other chemicals to keep away the weeds, or if you are starting a new flower bed, to lay down that black cloth of weed barrier, that keeps those little guys from ever seeing the light of day.

I think the best way we can run preventative maintenance to keep those pesky weeds out of lives – our faith, our relationships, our marriages – is to stick with a plan that’s been proven over and over again: reading God’s Word, spending time in prayer and spending time with other believers.

One thing Cliff and I are going to start trying to do more is praying together. It seems so simple, but it isn’t always. Again, it starts with the excuses – it’s too late tonight, we’re so busy, blah blah blah. But it isn’t as easy to get mad at someone you’re regularly and frequently coming to God with. We’ve done it before in our marriage, having a regular prayer time together, but with his deployment last year and then the transition the past six to eight months he’s been home, we haven’t picked it back up. But we’re going to try and start. And of course, prayer can apply to any situation with weeds that we’re dealing with.

I hope you’ll join me in getting some spring weeding done. God will bless you for it by showing you beauty you might never have realized was there.

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