Looming Evil
One late winter day a few years ago, I stepped out to the garden to see how it had wintered. I wanted to get peas in the ground and knew I would have some work to do before I could plant. I saw the usual decaying winter cover and of course, the weeds. I had planted none of these weeds, but there they were, growing as if I had intended them to own this space. As I walked through the area, I noticed one particularly offensive weed about 18″ tall. It was large and obtrusive, and I detested it immediately.
I walked over, grabbed the base of the monster, and pulled. Snap it went as I pulled off the top of the huge eye sore. It broke off just below the surface where the stem was the weakest. “Humph,” I said as I turned and walked away. “May that be the death of you.”
I finished pulling the smaller weeds and turned the soil where I wanted to plant my peas. A half hour later, I looked at my freshly planted area with pride and anticipation of fresh, spring peas. I gathered my tools and went to the house with no further thought of the looming evil in my garden.
With the rain here in Oregon, we do not need to worry much about watering in the early part of the year. It was a few weeks before I made it back out to the garden. With the consistent rain and comparatively warm winter weather the peas came up and grew quickly. It is such a wonderful feeling to see those first signs of the new life of spring. Then I saw it. It was only a few inches tall, but it was the same weed I had pulled up a few weeks earlier. I swear it was grinning at me-even taunting me.
I went to the garage and got a garden spade. I started to dig, relishing the delight I would feel when I had conquered this nasty intruder of my personal space. I had to be careful, thoughas I did not want to disrupt my peas.
“Time to go, honey,” my wife called from the back porch. I scowled at my green enemy, turned, and heeded my wife’s call. I imagined a mocking snicker as I walked around the corner and headed for the porch. “I’ll get it next time,” I muttered in temporary defeat.
It was a Sunday when it happened. I was sitting reading the paper. The weather was beautiful. The sun was shining, and the weather had been dry for a few days. Suddenly, I remembered the thing that had nagged at me for weeks. Every time I thought of that annoyingweed, taking up good nutrition from my garden, it irritated me. It was one of those things that never gained the priority of resolving until that moment.
I changed into my work clothes, grabbed a shovel and a small spade, and headed to the garden. The weed had grown disproportionately and was as tall as it had been weeks earlier when I thought I had ended its existence.
For the next fifteen minutes, I dug and pulled, pulled, and dug. The root went deep down into the clay soil into what seemed like concrete. There was almost something demonic about this enemy of good horticulture. It seemed to draw the strength of its existence from hell itself. I went to the garage to get a pick to break up the ground around the root. At one point the root split into several branches. I knew if I did not track down every bit of the root, I would be dealing with this little menace all summer. Finally, with one last pull, I got the last of the root from the ground. I held it up with glee and celebrated my victory. The weed was no longer an issue in my garden. Several of my pea plants paid the price for my victory.
A few weeks later, during my morning quiet time, God brought to my mind how my garden was a lot like life. Some areas of my life were fruitful. I was employing habits that cultivated these areas of my life. Other areas of my life were like the weeds I pulled. Occasionally, there was a weed in my life that required extra effort to overcome. Some weeds were simply beyond my power to eradicate.
For me, smoking had been one of those weeds that I tried for years to remove from my life. I started smoking at the age of seventeen and by age 20, I wanted to quit. I watched my dad, who after 50 years of smoking, was able to quite cold turkey. I tried that several times only to fail after a day or two. I tried smoking low nicotine cigarettes, I tried a gradual method. I tried everything available to me in the late 1970’s. Prayer and fasting were also employed before I came to a point of hopelessness. The urge to smoke with simply greater than my will to quit.
At one point, I got a sense in my spirit that I needed to stop striving, surrender my habit to God, and move forward with my life despite my habit. As I look back, I can see how by focusing on eliminating the problem of smoking in my life, I was looking more at my problem than I was at what God wanted to do in my life.
Surrender
In April of 1980, I felt led to attend the annual convention for our church’s denomination. It took place in Los Angeles, California at our founding church. They called it a Congress on Destiny and the focus was on ministering to the next generation of youth. I was twenty-three at the time, and I was feeling the prompting of God to do more with my life in ministry.
I attended the conference and stayed with a local family in La Crescenta, California. About six of us were staying with this family. They drove us back and forth, provided meals, and hosted us with hospitality I had not experienced before. There was only one rule. There was to be no smoking. I was in Los Angeles for a week and did not smoke even one cigarette. During my stay there, God moved in my life, and I knew I was to move to Los Angeles to attend our denominational Bible college.
When I left Portland a week before, I left a pack of nineteen cigarettes on top of my television set. When I returned a week later, I was able to throw them away. In the 44 years since then, I have smoked four or five cigarettes, all in the first five years or so since I quit smoking. Each time I smoked one, I had the same reaction. I hated it and knew I never wanted to go back to smoking. God delivered me from the habit of smoking by first guiding me to let it go and second by putting me in a place where I could not smoke. I could have chosen to smoke when I got home, but I chose not to smoke again. That was my part. God did the rest.
There are two lessons I carry with me to this day from that experience. First, some habits, like that demonic weed in my garden, have roots in our lives that go deep. We can overcome a lotof the issues we deal with in life with determination, discipline, and hard work. However, some issues such as addiction to food, drugs, cigarettes, porn, and other deep seated behavioral issues, require something beyond our own determination and self-discipline.
I have come to understand that even for those issues I am comfortable resolving on my own, I need to surrender them to God and rely upon the Holy Spirit for guidance and strength. I can do so much more in life when God is the King of my life. When we rely upon God for help in overcoming, we frequently see Him move in ways we could never orchestrate. He gives us the grace to endure and moves on our behalf because He loves us individually.
The second lesson I carry with me from this experience is that when I focus on a habit, or a problem in my life, what happens is the problem becomes larger than it is. To illustrate this, grab a three-by-five card and print the name of your problem on it. It might be smoking, it might be drugs, or gossip, or anything else in your life you feel you must get rid of before you be live the life you were meant to live. Now hold that three-by-five card three inches in front of your face on look at what you have written on the card. What do you see? You see the problem and only the problem. There is a whole life outside of that problem that you are missing because the problem is all that you can see.
Now, hold that card out at arm’s length. You can now see that life is so much more than your problem. I am convinced of this: God has a plan and purpose for each of us. We tend to think that we need to fix ourselves before we can live His plan and purpose. But God has a different view. He loves us right where we are, and His grace is sufficient to fulfill His plan and purpose in our lives even when we do not feel completely fixed. In fact, the process of our growth in life is a part of His plan. He knows we are flawed. He knows we are incomplete. He has accounted for that fact in His plan for our lives.
In my book, The Stanger’s Conflict, I talk about the process of sanctification as being that phase of life between coming to faith in Christ for salvation and receiving the fullness of our salvation when our time on earth is complete. In this process, we all experience the conflict between our sin nature and the Holy Spirit working in our lives to make us more like Christ. While we breathe the air of this world, that process will never be complete. We will always be battling weeds in the gardens of our souls. But God is working to fulfill His plan and purpose in us individually.
I encourage you to put the problems in your life in an appropriate perspective. Many times in life, the fix for our problem is to not focus on fixing the problem, but to focus on moving forward in God’s plan and purpose for our lives. When our purpose is right, many of the weeds of our lives will fade into history. If you would like to learn more about finding your purpose, I invite you to click the link below to discover more about how to find and live out your purpose in life.