Building a house left a lot of debris on the ground including a bunch of rocks that were leftover when we had the septic system installed. They weren’t in one neat pile but rather kind of scattered across a stretch of ground. They would need to be picked up because we couldn’t mow with them there. Friday evening, I grabbed our little red Flyer wagon and trundled over to start picking them up. There were large rocks and small rocks, all coated with a lovely layer of dust and needing to be removed from the yard.
While I was cleaning up the yard, I felt this overwhelming burden of what these rocks represented in the world we are living in now. It was almost tangible and suffocating in how heavy the sense of “this is important” felt. I didn’t write it down in the moment but this is what occurred to me:
As I was picking up and tossing each rock into the wagon, they reminded me of how we carry our burdens. Some are large, sharp, and seems like it’s all we can handle while others are smaller and might be more hidden beneath other burdens in our hearts. The rocks I picked up were different colors as they were created from different materials, just like our burdens can be formed from different things in our lives. I tore up a few fingernails and my fingertips felt a bit bruised pulling the stones from the ground; it seems similar to how removing burdens from our hearts can involve a little pain to achieve our goal.
In the midst of the rocks I was picking up were little plants with small yellow blooms. They grew in spite of the rocks around them because there was still soil to sprout from. They were a little scraggly but they were still growing and blooming.
This country is full of people carrying hearts full of burden. As I read about the riots, the violence, the lives lost and the property damaged, it’s like all these people have all these rocks in their hearts, all these burdens of all shapes and sizes. And each and every burden they carry are ones that God is waiting to receive. He is the wagon who can cart away our burdens, who can help us heal the landscape of our lives with His love and desire for us to be burden free.
Beneath the rocks of burden in our hearts is the soil where love and compassion can take root and grow, care for our fellow man can flourish and blossom into beauty if we as a people would be willing to nurture it with intention. We all need to be intentional with what we nurture in our hearts. Without attention, weeds (sin) can flourish just as easily as the plants we want (compassion, love, forgiveness) and oftentimes the weeds are faster growing and more invasive.
To quote Alastor “Mad Eye” Moody from the Harry Potter series, “Constant vigilance!” Vigilance, for those who are not sure about the definition, is “the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties” (source: dictionary.com). We must remain vigilant for what we allow to take root in our hearts and what that can grow into. Hurt could grow into hatred; apathy can grow into disdain. However, the same could be said of the positives like compassion and empathy growing into love for our fellow man.
While I was picking up rocks and contemplating the symbolism in what I was doing, my husband joined in and we got the kids outside to help. After all, as my mom likes to say, “many hands make light the work.” It took a good hour or so to remove the rocks from our yard and while there are still a few smaller pieces scattered across the dirt that I am sure we missed, the yard looks infinitely better. We carted off those rocks and used them to fill in a washed out part of the driveway. Just as those rocks filled a physical need to shore up our driveway, the emotional burdens can be used to learn from and heal from but only when we give them to God who can transform the “broken” and the “dirty” into something new. I hope you know, dear reader, that finding someone to help us deal with our burdens of the heart is just as okay as asking someone to help us with a physical task around the house.
As a follow up to my above commentary, it rained since I wrote this initially and I walked through the area we had cleaned up. Although we had raked through the dirt and grass in our quest to remove as many rocks as we could find, it became apparent that we had missed a few. Okay, several. The ones I saw were quite a bit bigger than I expected, like “How did we miss THAT one!?” That rain had washed away the dirt that had hidden them and exposed them to the light. Similarly, we may think we have removed the burdens from our heart and released them to God (or to the universe, if that is your philosophy) but then something comes along that exposes the burdens we have not shed yet.
I know this is not my typical “going green” post or a Financial Friday but just an observation about life.
Going Green In Texas 