To Obedience
Thursday, June 5, 2025
a chronic temptation,
Behaving Like Dandelions.
Psalm 50:16-17
But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to recite my statutes, or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you….”
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Matthew 7:21
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
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Words of Grace for Today –
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It is the age old temptation: reducing God’s goodness to our ability to do the right thing.
Of course so much of life depends on us doing the right thing, so one can easily understand that we get in a rut, and apply our own limited way of being to God’s love for us.
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After a week of oppressive heat and smoke:
Odd thing, chilled to the bone,
I head out in the cool air to mow the weeds on the hill.
Last time through that hillsides greens just two days ago, lots of dandelions and crab grass did not submit to the mower blade, dull as it was, wet as the weeds were.
So dressed warm enough to protect my back from the chill, enjoying being outside after the smoke has subsided enough to breathe the air more or less easily, I set to the task.
Walking up and down and across and back, this way and that, mowing it more or less down, for a bit more than an hour, and I work up just a slight sweat.
Back inside, where the temperature has dropped a degree, it feels nice and warm, comfortable.
Exercise seems to be what we were made for, wonders of wonders.
Now if there just were an exercise that would solve the other challenges that keep me pinned down in poverty.
But God built us to work to survive, even when, maybe especially when, poverty has us tight in its grip.
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We could learn from nature.
Take the dandelion.
It puts down deep and fat roots, so that when there is little water, barely enough to survive on, it can still pull in water from deeper down. When that even that water dries up that fat root still has plenty of moisture stored in that fat root to survive a few more days and even weeks, until rain replenishes the ground, or even a heavy dew provides some moisture for the plant to survive.
Do we put down deep and fat roots? Into what do our roots round us? In the ways of the world? Or into God’s word.
You see that nearly indestructible dandelion does something else, something that fits with the ways of the world, even for us humans. It spreads it big leaves thick and wide around the root, sucking in all the sun for itself, while other plants nearby are starved of that life-giving light.
We can learn from the dandelion about deep and wide roots, but from it’s leaves stealing life from others, well that’s something we can learn NOT to do from the dandelion. Oh, those bright yellow blossoms are pretty, but after the blossom turn to seed, well those white fluffs are not that pretty nor nice, and those empty stems covering the lawn are plain ugly. The worst of it is that a lawn made of dandelions, and left to their own devices that’s what they do to any lawn, well, that lawn is miserable. Both to mow and to walk on, and to look at. No, the greedy dandelion is not what we need imitate.
We do not get ahead in life as God created us to live it, and we especially do not earn God’s blessings, or even please God when we try to get ahead, at the cost of others being able to live, and live fully.
God loves us, unconditionally.
Everything good we do is a response to that love permeating our lives. The Spirit in us!
We receive all the great gifts we have from the Spirit, starting with life and breath itself, only so that we can share them with others, so that others may live full lives. And so they will learn to share their gives with others.
For when we hang together in God’s great love, taking care of each other we live well. But when we don’t hang together, we hang separately from the noose of meaninglessness, futility, and wasted lives.