My friend Cindy loves to garden. She has beautified the space she lives in just by adding loving touches like color and hardscape. She also "tithes" on the skills God has endowed her with by donating much time to landscaping at her church.
Yesterday, she decided to do "a little cleanup" after attending a Bible study at her house of worship. The job looked simple enough. Just some trees she wanted to extricate from the overgrowth that was obscuring their beauty and feeding on their nutrients. Five and a half hours later, she was grimy from removing a massive group of vines that had become tangled around an otherwise healthy tree. Every time she thought she was done, there was yet another layer of roots that had embedded themselves into the surrounding soil. She noted clinically that, while she was working, a group of men from the church showed up for an outside activity. Dressed and prepped for the great outdoors, they nevertheless failed to offer assistance to the obviously struggling young woman. The pastor, likewise, passed her without comment or even offering a drink of water.
When I stated that these oversights would have angered me, Cindy replied that she merely found them interesting and analogous to the sin problem many churches face. On the surface, things look like they're going along fine. There might be critical murmurings or minor dissension, just like those weeds that looked so manageable before she started tackling them. But we don't have to finish what we fail to begin, so many times we simply overlook the symptoms of a larger problem so as not to get our hands dirty. And eventually those weeds - tares, really - turn out to be only the tip of a colossal undergrowth of life-killing manglers that we would have discovered if only we had dared disturb the surface.
Is Cindy looking to cause problems, stir the pot, as it were? Heaven forbid. This Godly woman labors for her Lord because she loves Him with all her heart and soul and mind (Matthew 22:37); she's not looking for recognition or help, unless others feel the call to give it. Neither is she suggesting believers dig around in healthy gardens looking for worms. I think she would agree, though, that we ought not avoid obvious signs of trouble just because the task looks unappealing.
For more like this, check out: Morsels for Meditation...: Weeds 2
Morsels for Meditation...: Tenacity
Yesterday, she decided to do "a little cleanup" after attending a Bible study at her house of worship. The job looked simple enough. Just some trees she wanted to extricate from the overgrowth that was obscuring their beauty and feeding on their nutrients. Five and a half hours later, she was grimy from removing a massive group of vines that had become tangled around an otherwise healthy tree. Every time she thought she was done, there was yet another layer of roots that had embedded themselves into the surrounding soil. She noted clinically that, while she was working, a group of men from the church showed up for an outside activity. Dressed and prepped for the great outdoors, they nevertheless failed to offer assistance to the obviously struggling young woman. The pastor, likewise, passed her without comment or even offering a drink of water. When I stated that these oversights would have angered me, Cindy replied that she merely found them interesting and analogous to the sin problem many churches face. On the surface, things look like they're going along fine. There might be critical murmurings or minor dissension, just like those weeds that looked so manageable before she started tackling them. But we don't have to finish what we fail to begin, so many times we simply overlook the symptoms of a larger problem so as not to get our hands dirty. And eventually those weeds - tares, really - turn out to be only the tip of a colossal undergrowth of life-killing manglers that we would have discovered if only we had dared disturb the surface.
Is Cindy looking to cause problems, stir the pot, as it were? Heaven forbid. This Godly woman labors for her Lord because she loves Him with all her heart and soul and mind (Matthew 22:37); she's not looking for recognition or help, unless others feel the call to give it. Neither is she suggesting believers dig around in healthy gardens looking for worms. I think she would agree, though, that we ought not avoid obvious signs of trouble just because the task looks unappealing.
For more like this, check out: Morsels for Meditation...: Weeds 2
Morsels for Meditation...: Tenacity
No comments:
Post a Comment