Back when I first started dealing with buffalo bur, I thought that I’d come up with a clever easy way to control the nasty little fiends around the yard; a way that our kids could help out with them. Simply cut the plants off at the ground, and they’ll die, right? I mean, it works for a lot of other things after all.
Unfortunately, hope and reality don’t always connect, and what we ended up with instead were much more vibrant plants. We didn’t get the root out, so instead of eliminating the plants, they came back much stronger and harder to kill. And in most cases, instead of having only one plant, it returned with several different shoots. This time around, it was much more difficult to pull them out too, because they’d had so long to really build out their root structure. In most cases this meant that we had to pull really hard, but in other cases, the plants would just snap off at the ground, waiting for round three of the fight.
Going forward I changed tactics – instead of cutting them off at the ground, I went for the root, and pulled them out. In most cases, that’s the only way that they didn’t keep coming back.
Sometimes in our lives we can have a tendency to do the same thing – instead of really addressing a problem and getting to the root of the issue, we deal with the symptoms; merely cutting things off at the surface. But while that might seem like a quick fix, by not addressing the actual cause of the situation, it only grows stronger in our lives, and more difficult to eradicate.
In our lives, as well as with buffalo bur, we need to make sure that we dig down to the root of the problem. It’s the only way to make sure that it’s actually, truly addressed.