How do you tackle a yard full of weeds?

Last September my wife and I realized a dream that we thought would be way off in the distance. We were able to buy a house. We were able to take advantage of this foreclosure/ economic crisis happening all around us. The house we bought had sat empty for over a year and the bank that owned it just didn't seem to have the time during those twelve plus months to do anything with the yard. So we inherited yards full of weeds. We live on the central coast (in Salinas), which is a farmers paradise. Guess what, weeds grow good here too. Our front and back yards are a testament to that fact. We have weeds - big, ugly, hairy weeds -weeds with deep roots. In the front yard I scattered weed and feed the weeds just gobbled that stuff up. I started ripping up the weeds in my lawn, now the front yard is patchy, somehow the weeds still are thriving. It is going to be a long haul.

Last night I was pulling out a small jungle on one half of my backyard. The roots were so deep and there were so many that I had to dig three holes four feet deep to get them out of there. As I was working it hit me, if you want to see something good in the place of something that has been infested with weeds it is going to take a lot of hard work, tenacity bordering on outright stubbornness, and when you are about to give up you just need to buckle down and go at it again.

A beautiful garden or lawn just doesn't evolve from a weed infested wasteland overnight. Neither does a growing and thriving ministry. When you take on a ministry in decline often it come with its own thorns and dare I say even weeds. The ground needs to be prepared, it needs to be nurtured. This takes an incredible amount of time, more than likely it will take more time and energy and investment that you probably originally counted the cost for. You will see great strides take place only to become dismayed by new setbacks from time to time. But tending to this work of God requires that you stay the course even when the task seems beyond your reach.

I was dreaming of a beautiful, weed-free yard yesterday. I was envisioning that day when I will be able to put in an hour or so a week just maintaining it, pulling a small weed or two and occasionally pruning things back. The reality is that for the kind of growth that you desire in a garden or lawn it takes work. Growth is not maintenance. If you maintain it it will all die and eventually be taken over again. This is true in the church as well. We are never here to just maintain, we are here to grow a beautiful church. Our worship leader Chris Bohrman said to me in his own words yesterday that he sensed that maybe we were starting to maintain a little bit after this great push we just had over Easter. Its time to pull out the shearers and shovels and go back to work.