The 5-foot root

It's been a busy few weeks and my blogging has lapsed unintentionally. As a welcome back, I'm not going to delve into the political climate or the events of this week that have brought me to tears and to unfriending a few people on Facebook who don't support law enforcement, instead I'm going to talk about a little lesson that I came across a week or so ago.

I decided it was time to buckle down and work on the house, and in order to scrape and paint, some weedy bushes needed to come out.

So I went to start cutting branches and digging at root systems, which turned out easier said than done. When I had gotten the largest branches out of the way, I had to get the rocky landscaping out of the way. A few rocks in a single layer I figured.

Wrong.

One layer of rock. Two layers of rock. Three layers of rock. A layer of black plastic, and wait more rock.

What? Two layers of rock and plastic? Who does this?

I dug down, and got one root out, and then saw that this root jutted out horizontally and another bush was coming from the same root a few feet away. The entire structure was actually one plant.

An hour later and plenty of sweat later, I couldn't go on. Literally. I was jumping on the shovel and it wasn't budging. I physically couldn't dig any deeper and I physically could not loosen this root, so I packed up and waited for my husband.

The next day, I was at work and he had a day off, and I get a video of him trying to pull this bush root out with a wire winched to the four-wheeler. It wasn't budging.

Then I got another video showing the 5-foot root that had finally come up, breaking the four-wheeler winch while it was at it.

Now, go with me here, because Nate said this is a stretch, but I think those bushes were a whole lot like sin. I could get the small bushes that were growing nearby out pretty easily, but I pulled them when they were little and young. But the longer we left these bushes, the more they grew and the deeper their roots were. By the time they were developed, it took more than the little bit of pruning that I could do. We needed help from some heavy machinery.

Sin is easy to get rid of when it is small. And you can probably do it yourself, of course with the forgiveness of God. But when sin starts to dig in, it's not only incredibly difficult to get out but it's also impossible to do on your own. You're going to need the help of others to eradicate sin from your life, the support of others, the strength of others.

Don't let sin become a 5-foot root that won't budge. Take notice of it when it's little and don't let it get a foothold.