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.