Lessons Learned While Leaf Blowing
My home sets in the middle of many water oak trees and a few Bradford pear trees. I spend a lot of time in the fall and winter cleaning up leaves. Water oak trees drop their leaves a few at a time for many months so this job of keeping them cleaned up seems endless at times. I was reminded yesterday as I was blowing leaves out to my curb of a lesson the Lord taught me about leave blowing a few years ago when I was in the middle of the same endeavor.
As anyone who has ever blown leaves knows, you cannot blow them against the wind. If you try, you will lose the battle to send them in the direction you want them to go. That day in the past it was a still day except occasionally a slight breeze would blow. When the breeze came I had to stop until it passed or change my direction to blow the leaves with the wind and not against it. What the Lord started speaking to me was that the Holy Spirit works the same way. When He is moving we need to move with Him and He will propel us even farther than expected but if we keep trying to move the same way we were, we find ourselves fighting against Him and we get nowhere. It could also push us backwards, just like when blowing the leaves toward the wind does.
Yesterday, as I contemplated this lesson, the Lord pointed out two more things He wanted to teach me while I was blowing the never-ending leaves out of my yard. My cord finds everything imaginable to get hung up on while I am working on propelling the leaves to the curb and I have to stop and go unhook it from a rock or a tree root that has it trapped. There are obstacles in life that will "hang us up" if we are not careful. Even when we are moving with the Holy Spirit, especially then, because our enemy wants to get us hung up and not be able to move any farther. These things can be our own disobedience to something the Lord is asking us to do or not to do, maybe we have taken on an offense and are not willing to forgive the offender. It could be any number of things but they stop us dead in our tracks. I tug at the cord. I try flipping the cord over the obstacle but inevitably I have to go to the place where the cord is hung up and free it. Are there areas in your life where you need to go to the place where you got hung up and deal with what needs dealt with so you can be free to move forward?
The second thing the Lord pointed out to me was that of the roots that stop me dead in my leaf blowing tracks.They stick up out of the ground with their broken, ragged ends and grab hold of my power cord like the gnarled fingers of an old hag and keep me from moving to where I need to move to finish my job. Many times there are wounds from our past and lies in our belief systems that are rooted in us that hold us back from being all God intends us to be. Our enemy reaches his own gnarled fingers around our minds to keep us in the place of wounding and away from the truth. Again, we must go back to the original source of where these roots have hung us up and let the Lord show us truth and heal our places of wounding so we can move forward in our walk with Him.
