what's underneath?

My parents have a beautiful lawn......um, not....
Their lawn is covered in thistles, dandilions and quack grass. It's a pain in the ass to cut and to care for. But it wasn't always this way.

When my parents first viewed the house, the lawn was green, fresh, and weed free. There were even a couple of planters in the backyard for a garden and flowers. It looked amazing! After the first year, the lawn was easy to keep nice and green. A couple of doses of fertilizer, water and regular cutting did the job.

The second year was quite a bit harder to maintain, weeds were popping up and parts of the lawn were going brown.
The third year was the charm, that was when it hit us all the truth of this lovely lawn.
The previous owners, in order to sell the house, laid sod ON TOP of a CRAP lawn! As a quick fix, she didn't bother to rip up the old lawn to lay the new one. The root system of the old was never ripped out......so....after 3 years of sweating to keep this "nice green lawn" looking good, we realized the inevitable was taking place. Whatever was underneath was slowly poking through and was going to take over the whole yard.

My parents now know that they will never have a "velvet" lawn. My dad did put some decent effort this year (the 6th year) into it, but all his efforts were useless in match of the root system.
The only answer to this is to gut out the whole thing and lay NEW SEED.
It's such a good picture for me. Bad fruit comes from bad roots. You can't fake good fruit if the roots are bad, you just can't. The years that we've given it a good honest effort to green up the lawn, we can never produce something that's not there.

In this last year, I've been challenged to my very being, to my very core, and I still am. I had to make some very hard choices this year. I love my sisters post on choose. It says it totally bang on. Choose your hard.

Joe and I almost didn't make it last year. It's been one full year since my hubby walked out that door and a broken family was a very real reality staring me in the face. Both Joe and I have made the HARD choice to reconcile. I say HARD because it's not easy to rip up a lawn. Up root a tree, jack hammer out a foundation!!! But that's what we've chosen to do. All the bad fruit coming from bad roots needed to be uprooted.

Daily, I still face the choice between what kind of lawn I want in my life. It's really really hard! It seems so much easier to just give it some water, throw it some seed in hopes of good fruit, but in the long run, at the end of the day, it's still a lawn full of weeds. This has been my challenge. With God's grace, Joe and I have been able to uproot some really yucky stuff. But on a personal level, talking about me, and what's inside of my heart, God is calling me to trust him to uproot even more. It's so scary. Who wants to be bear looking like a big dirt pile? Who wants to go through the back breaking work of the digging, the dumping, and the planting? Alot of times....not me.....

I keep calling to the warrior in me, to be strong and courageous, to be brave and full of hope and faith that I will be better off to dig than to throw seed into the wind.
Maybe everytime I pass my parents lawn and see all the weeds, I will be reminded that that's NOT what I want.

Reason for the dream

If you read my last post, I had a dream a few days ago. God spoke to me the next day as to why he gave that dream to me.

In my dream, there are two ways of looking at the situation.
The first perspective is to see a wife who is going to cheat on her husband! She is making very poor choices and is not taking responsiblity for her actions! She should have someone knock some sense into her! If nothing else, Joe should be furious and hurt! She should have the natural consequences come to her, so that she will learn her lesson. She should be corrected, reproofed, rebuked, and punished. Joe should show her very limited mercy, since she was about to commit one of the most betraying sins there is!

Or.......

In my dream (if you read it) Joe lovingly, and full of compassion and mercy, whispers gently in my ear that God the Father would heal me, love me and show me my worth. Why would a husband do that? Or a more important question is HOW could a husband do that?

By the power of God and all that He is....God IS THOSE THINGS, and to move HIS heart THROUGH Joe is EXACTLY what God wants us to do for others! God SEES the brokenness of our hearts. In my dream, Joe saw through the eyes of God and saw my pain, my hurt, my low self worth. He understood WHY I would do such a thing. God doesn't concentrate on WHAT we do....but WHY we do them.....

It's in this kind of amazing relationship that people are healed, set free, and released from sin. In my dream, I didn't WANT to cheat on Joe! I just wanted love, I just wanted comfort, and in my brokenness, I did NOT know HOW to find it.....

It's through God, picking us up, whispering love into our ear, in the midst of our sin that we find out that we are loved no matter what.

a dream

i had a very interesting dream last night.

It was like I was 15, confused, angry, hurt, and my self worth was lower than zero. I But at the same time, I was 30 years old and married to Joe and had all my kids.
In my dream, I was wandering around aimlessly, trying to find anyone to love me. Using an old pattern, I thought that sleeping with someone would gain me worth. But ALSO knowing that sleeping with just anybody was a disrespectful thing to do to myself. But I didn't care.....any sort of false comfort, or peace would do at this point.....
So I found a bed of someone I knew, laid down in it waiting for him to come home, find me, then take advantage of me.
Instead, I woke up to Joe whispering softly in my ear, praying for me, that I would know my worth....
Then, he carried me home......