Today I weeded my yard. Not the flower beds or walkways... the grass.
This is not normal for me. I grew up in Utah and winter was a time of snow blowing and shoveling, not weeding and mowing. And never have I needed to weed my grass until last fall when the grapevines appeared.

But if you could see my yard, you would know it needed to be weeded. It was bad enough that a man even stopped by (while I was out working) and gave me his card offering is yard services. He pointed to the weeds I was pulling and said, "I have a big mower. All these weeds....it KILL them!" I shook his hand and thanked him for his offer and went on my way. My daughter helped by walking around the weeds pulling up a strand at a time and saying, "Tree! Tree!" I just chuckled and said, "Yes. It looks like a tree."

After hours of pulling, sunburn and mosquito bites, I finally came to my last big weed. It was a few feet wide and a foot or two long. It was weaving in and out of the grass and I knew it would be the toughest pull yet. I searched for the biggest root, wrapped my fingers tight around it and started to pull. It wouldn't budge. For the next few minutes I tried different ways to tug and pull. It was no good. I got on both knees, gathered the bush into my chest, wrapped both hands around the base and pulled. Nothing. I started digging through the grass pulling out small chunks. After several small chunks were out of the way, I gathered the large base in my hands. If only my hands were double in size and my muscles were triple in strength.

I gave it my best shot and out came a clump of roots. I did this 3 more times and eventually all 4 clumps of roots were out. I had done it. I stood overlooking my yard and the giant pile of weeds. No passerby would even notice. No visiting friends or even my husband would probably think my yard looked good. Because it doesn't. The grass is dead just like it should be in the middle of winter. But it looked good to me. More importantly, it felt good. 

So is life. We all have weeds. Challenges, heartache, weakness, sin. All these things that create a garden of weeds that need to be pulled. Some are easy to see, some are too small to notice. And when we pull them out, nobody but us may notice the difference. Nobody else knows how hard we had to pull. And nobody, but us, reaps the rewards of the pulling that we had to do.

We see the difference. We become stronger. We feel more beautiful. 

It doesn't matter if anyone notices, because we feel good.