Weeds!

When our girls were younger, we took “driving” vacations across the country. For about 5 years we packed for every weather condition, got to the end of our street, opened up an atlas and we took turns each year throwing something at the atlas and that was where we went for vacation. One year we went to Canada because our youngest daughter threw her chewed gum at the atlas and that’s where it landed.
I finally got tired of driving around until two in the morning looking for a hotel room and started planning our vacations and making reservations-like normal people.
We had one of those big, gas-guzzling vans that had a sofa that made into a bed, a VCR so we could watch movies and a built-in cooler for water and juice. Because my husband drove a lot for his job, I usually did the majority of the driving. The television, unfortunately, was right behind the driver’s head. That really stunk because Jerry and the girls watched every Three Stooges ever filmed, National Lampoon’s “Christmas Vacation” and “Animal House.” Can you tell who chose the movies?
The girls especially loved the Three Stooges. They knew all the dialog to each and every one of the tapes we had. I wasn’t a fan of their violent behavior, but they were pretty funny.
There was one skit that the girls and my husband especially liked and still performs. Moe, Curly and Larry are in the kitchen wrestling with an artichoke without much success. Curly is ready to give up on the whole idea when Moe asks him what he ate as a child and Curly said, “Weeds!” For some reason, this skit would make our girls crack up laughing every time.
I was thinking about that skit as I was cutting our grass last week. We are surrounded by farmland and all the farmers are preparing the land for crops. The farmer to the south of us has the most beautiful crop of purple flowers you would ever want to see. I thought he planted these flowers on purpose. Then I found out that these beautiful purple flowers are weeds and the farmers fight quite hard to eliminate them.
Wikipedia.com says that “A weed, in a general sense, is a plant that is considered by the user of the term to be a nuisance, and normally applied to unwanted plants in human-made settings such as gardens, lawns or agricultural areas. Generally, a weed is a plant in an undesired place.”
I have about two hours on the mower so I have a lot of time to think. Some would say, maybe too much! As I looked at those beautiful plants that the farmers were working so hard to get rid of, it occurred to me that those weeds were a lot like sin. Sin is definitely “unwanted” and ends up in “an undesired place”-our lives.
It reminds me that sin is sometimes disguised as something that is pretty and good for us. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a weed and a good plant. Take for example, Dandelions. They are classified as a weed and yet people make wine out of them and children make wishes on their seeds blowing in the wind. Who would think that is bad? How often do you think sin is disguised as something perfectly acceptable and harmless?
There are a lot of buzz words out there these days such as “tolerance” and “choice.” I suppose it depends on what you are “choosing” to be “tolerant” of. Scripture makes it pretty clear what God will and will not choose to tolerate. He does not try to “pretty it up” and disguise it as something it is not.
Once a sin becomes an acceptable behavior, it spreads like a weed. It begins to blur the line. If everyone else thinks it’s okay, it must be okay.
The best place to look and see if something is okay or not, is the Bible. Paul tells us in Romans 14:23, “…whatever is not from faith is sin.”
I suppose you could look at the Bible as a great WEEDeater!