I live in the desert, the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert to be exact in central New Mexico.  It’s dry in the desert, it’s brown in the desert (well, that’s not totally true, the Bosque is beautiful and dances with color for nine months out of the year … you can Google “Bosque”) and it is not humid in the desert (a definite advantage).  I grew up in Oregon, so this was a huge shock to my system and to my skin that evidently was accustomed to moisture in the air.  Along with all of the obvious permutations my Pacific Northwest personality had to navigate, was summer rain; monsoons.

At first this southwest phenom sounded a bit tropical (which suited me fine), although that was before I had experienced walls of water careening down arroyos, flash floods that mysteriously evaporated by the next day and what it did to dormant, hidden little specs of vegetation we call: WEEDS.

As I was out pulling the new monsoon fed flora which had cropped-up in our front yard overnight this morning, it occurred to me, how fast weeds crop up in my life; agitation, pride, anger, gossip, lust, selfishness, laziness, malice, gluttony… okay you get the idea.  We’re all like this, admit it or not, we all struggle occasionally with weeds in our lives.  Left unattended, the little seeds lying under the surface of our human-ness can grow into weeds that will riddle our attitudes, behaviors, words and actions with poisonous, noxious, joy-robbing infection.

How do we maintain our “soil” with all of the “rain, wind, chaos, lightening and thunder” swirling all around us in our day-to-day lives?  Colossians 3:1-2 says, “…set you hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Set you minds on things above, not on earthly things.”  Peter got to live this first hand when Jesus told him to walk out on the water toward Him in Matthew 14~ he stepped out of the boat and was actually walking on water, until what?!  The Bible says when he “saw the wind..” he started to sink.  He took his eyes off of Jesus, he listened to the chaos around him.

For a split second there were no weeds in Peter’s heart, no earthly things, no distractions~ only Jesus.  The weeds will come people, don’t get distracted by the rain, the wind or the lightening~ pull them out, remove the invasive little thorn before it poisons your entire heart.  Set you heart on things above~