Soul Fertilizer

Last July, my wife and I moved into a new place off Garrett Road. One of the selling points was the yard. It wasn’t nearly as spacious as the farm my wife grew up on, but considering properties in Durham, it was at least a yard with space for kids to run and play. It wasn’t much to look at. In fact, the only things green in our backyard were the weeds and the poison ivy. I considered what kind of effort it would take for me to have our then year and half old daughter realize the dream of being able to play in our backyard without the ill effects of the overgrowth. I think Samantha and I settled on the time it would take as the year she was to go off to college. Agreeing this was unacceptable, I took the plunge…I hired an expert to tame my jungle and kill my weeds.

Within a week there was a three-man crew out at my house getting busy creating my vision of a yard – my little paradise! The first day, they got to work cutting back trees, pulling out the overgrown bushes, and edging in the clay an outline of what would become a yard. These guys knew what they were doing, and at the end of the first day, they had transformed my jungle into a workable blank slate. Day two was more remarkable as they built up beds in which my bushes were to be planted. They also spread some topsoil into my clay so that the grass seed roots had something to grow into. Day three was the craziest of all as the foreman showed up with all kinds of bushes and shrubs for me to choose which ones to be planted in my little slice of earth. By the end of day three, everything was in place, and the transformed was almost complete.

Yet, the ground surrounding the bushes still needed work. I had to wait for the grass seeds to germinate in the soil before I could call this paradise. It took a good 3 weeks of watering my new dirt before I saw any signs of progress. What came after that was a slow, but steady, stream of bright green spikes emerging from the ground. After that is was two months of consistant watering and tending these tiny blades of grass. During the fall, I had to keep the leaves off the tender grass, almost by hand, so as not to have them suffocate my lawn. However, this tedium was worth it because when November came along, I had a thick carpet of dark green grass without one hint of the former weeds. I was proud of the transformation. Success at last! The kids can now play freely! Then came the month of March.

Almost overnight, there was not a place in my yard that didn’t contain a weed. The grass was no longer think and green. It had faded from glory over the winter months, and I was sure that one of my neighbors had dumped a truck-load of weed seed on my yard. I was crushed to see my yard disappear each day only to be replaced by more weeds! My wife encouraged me to call the expert again. He asked what was wrong, and I told him that the seed he put down must have been some sort of annual grass. He asked me one question, “Did you put down any pre-emergent fertilizer over the winter months?” I sheepishly confessed that I didn’t put down any fertilizer. He told me, “Just because we killed the weeds that lived in your soil when we planted the grass, doesn’t mean we killed the seeds that those weeds left behind.” My heart sank. I wasn’t prepared for that battle.

This little story of trying to grow grass in my yard replays again and again in my heart. God plants his word over and over in my life, but I need to tend it in order for it to grow and bear fruit in my life. I have patterns of living my own life without trusting God, and even though those actions are removed, those patterns leave seeds that can grow up later. I need a good fertilizer. The Hebrews used to meditate on God’s word in order to fertilize his word in their life. Psalm 1 is a good example of this use of meditation.

As Jesus plants his word in our lives, pray that we as a community might be diligent to fertilize it, by meditating on his words of life.