We’ve been working for months to try to control the buffalo bur in our yard. While it still crops up in various places, we’ve kept what does show up from getting too big, and so far it seems like we’ve been winning the battle against seed pods, which is encouraging.
The other day I happened to look out into the neighbor’s lot around us, and the stuff is everywhere. Not just small plants, but big, bushy, knee-high ones, full of seed pods, previously hidden from view by larger plants. But now that fall is approaching and things are starting to die back, their existence is becoming very obvious.
Even if they were to let us rove their property, there’s no way that we would be able to get them all pulled. So that means that here before too long, the winds are going to pick up and try to blow those seeds into our yard, and next spring we’ll have more fun. Although, with all the work we’ve done in our yard this year to get under control what we didn’t take care of last year, next year will hopefully be easier.
While we can’t control our neighbors and what they do with their property, we do have options with external influences in our lives. We all have weaknesses and struggles, and there are folks who can serve as ‘enablers’ to those aspects of our lives. Instead of working to help us grow and improve, they serve as boat anchors to drag us down and keep us from being free of the sin, the bad fruit, in our lives.
Sometimes it’s easy to get away from bad outside influences, because they’re toxic and we just don’t want anything to do with them. But, sometimes it’s not that easy, because of the space they inhabit in our lives (family members, coworkers, etc.) And other times, if we were totally honest with ourselves, we don’t necessarily want to be free from them for various reasons (we have fun when we’re with them, we’ve got a history with them that goes way back, etc.)
The problem is, unless we distance ourselves from those outside influences, it will be extremely difficult to be free from that sin in our lives. They’ll be just like the buffalo bur in our neighbors’ property, full of seeds ready to fly into our yard. And when we’re continually having sin’s ‘seeds’ fly into the yard of our lives, it will be very difficult to keep them from sprouting and growing.