Today’s Reading: Genesis 46-48; Matthew 13: 1-30
When I was around twelve or thirteen years old my Dad decided that it was time for me to learn how to be a man. All of the manual labor that needed to be done around the house was done by the two of us.
Literally this meant that he showed me how he wanted it done and I did it.
Wack.
On one such occasion I was given the task of weeding the back yard.
This may already sound bad, but no… you have no idea… The backyard was not a yard… it was all weeds.
No grass... all weeds.
“Are you serious?” I thought to myself.
“Yes I am” said the look in his eye.
Sigh…
So we go outside and he shows me how to weed. I am not supposed to just pull at the stem of the weed and rip it out of the ground. No. I am to make sure that I get all of the roots in the process.
“If you leave any of the roots then the weed will grow back” he told me.
I devoted hours of back breaking work to this task and after what must have been weeks of work the job was done.
It was punishing.
When I was reading the Parable of the Weeds today it made me think of that time and how hard it was to properly rid our yard of those weeds.
Our lives are the same way.
There are certain things that we pick up in the course of living our lives that make it hard for us to cultivate the good fruits we are trying to grow.
One of those for me has always been TV. I can waste hours and hours of otherwise productive time watching TV. I will watch the same bad romantic comedies over and over again, or consecutive showings of SportsCenter or reruns of Seinfeld for the tenth time.
What I have come to realize is that every moment spent wasting this time was time that I could have spent pursuing my purpose. The TV weeds were taking
all of the time and energy that should be used to water and nurture the seeds of faith and hard work necessary for me to be who I am supposed to become.
So finally after many moons of deliberation, my roommate and I just decided to get rid of cable.
Yes we will save money. That is an obvious benefit. But the most exciting thing about unplugging from cable, pulling out that weed, is that the fields of my mind will have so much more creativity and energy to nourish the seeds of my purpose.
I just hope that I have pulled this one out at the root… the networks do have their shows on the internet these days…
Gotta stay strong… We shall see.
This reminds me (kinda) of the movie WALL-E. In this movie all these people are living on a spaceship and robots do everything for them, they move around on levitating chairs, and have these monitors in front of them to talk to friends, etc. They are so stuck in this way of life, they don't even know that they have a pool on this ship, and no one can walk (cause they do everything from these chairs). I guess the point is (if there is one on all this rambling I'm doing), is that God intends for us to use all our senses to maximize the experience of living. And we waste away some part of our lives when we don't engage all of what He's given us. Not sure this comment has any relevance to the parable or the post, and maybe I'm just talking to myself. Who knows...
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