Sunday Morning Musings: Crabgrass

Some of you already know where I'm going with this because you know about crabgrass!!  It is obnoxious stuff, and I had a lot of time to contemplate the many ways crabgrass annoys me yesterday while weeding my flowerbeds.  The horrid plant is everywhere, but truly it is my own fault.  I have sadly neglected my flower beds, partly because of the weather, partly because I knew as soon as the kids saw me weeding, they'd be yanking out every green thing that survived our rodent deer, but mostly because I've been busy doing other things.  You know, like eating my bon bons and watching soaps.  Whatever the reason, the crabgrass was choking out the plants I actually wanted, and had formed its characteristic mat, so it had to go.  I'm sure there are chemicals to kill crabgrass, but my kids play in the flower bed and there are so many other kinds of plants there, I'm not even sure what I could safely use, so I just had to pull it up by the roots.

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And while I was getting sunburned and fighting cramping in my hands, I thought about how there are habits in our lives that are a lot like crabgrass.  They pop up little shoots, and look rather like any other innocent blade of grass, but if we do not yank them right out, they grow and spread and start causing major problems that are much harder to deal with.  Think about how discontent can grow into grumbling and even into anger.  Uprooting a habit of anger is much more difficult than simply turning a discontented heart toward gratitude.  Crabgrass is a particularly apt metaphor for anger (and other bad habits!) because the plant also has an allelopathic effect, meaning that it puts out a toxin of some sort that inhibits the growth of nearby plants.  Don't we see this in angry people?  They can't find happiness anywhere because their anger is squashing out any opportunities for joy.

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So without belaboring the point further, I'm asking the question, are there any crabgrass seedlings in my life?  If I find there are, I must yank them out!  Are there any choking mats of crabgrass that are keeping me from a life abundant with joy?  Let me not delay another second in beginning to tear apart the roots of those mats.

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