Forward

“I went past the field of a sluggard, past the vineyard of someone who has no sense; thorns had come up everywhere, the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins. I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw: A l little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.”

Proverbs 24:30-34

This set of verses strongly encourages us to be diligent.  This past week at Freedom, we applied Proverbs 24:30-34 to so much more than keeping up our yards. The neglect of any area of our life results in ruin.

Let’s talk about how “poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man” when we neglect the important things in our lives in exchange for the easy way. I’ll go first…

Historically, I have been extremely non-confrontational and tended to choose the path of least resistance. So when things were okay, I was good with okay. I didn’t feel much pressure to make them great. After all, moving toward greatness was hard and it could rock the boat and make things really complicated.

There are many examples in my life of this: relationships, projects, career-related things, etc. I have to fight really hard against this tendency in my life in order to move things that are simply good to great.

The matriarch of my family was the glue that held us all together. She was our “relationship facilitator.” If there was something I needed to talk to my other family members about, she would say, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.” I very rarely needed to have any conversation – let alone important ones that define relationships – with any of them because she’d do it for me.  

Then one day, when I was 32, she was gone. Within a matter of weeks, I realized that scarcity and poverty abounded because I had spent years sleeping and slumbering when it came to various family relationships. Weeds had overtaken the vineyard and I didn’t know how to be a daughter/sister/niece/granddaughter without my mother to facilitate. The walls were in disrepair specifically regarding one particular relationship. I felt helpless. And eventually I felt angry. I didn’t even know where to begin.

So I chose not to begin at all. There was a stretch of time that I was so unhappy that the awkward tension in the room was palpable when I was with the person. I was miserable and unpleasant and it made for very awkward family birthday parties and holidays.

I couldn’t stand it anymore.  At age 36, I had to make a decision: Either fester in resentment for the rest of my life or begin pulling weeds and create the relationship that I wanted. The pain of staying the same had finally become more difficult than the pain of changing.

So, little by little, I made steps toward fixing the disrepair. Some of the weeds were harder to pull than others. The difficult weeds included altering my unrealistic expectations, choosing not to be stubborn, and adjusting the perpetual “thirteen year old girl attitude” I seemed to be stuck in. But the actual rebuilding of the wall was remarkably easier than I anticipated! I began making regular phone calls when I didn’t want to, sending texts regarding times of baseball games and band concerts in spite of what I thought the answer would be, having difficult conversations even though I knew I’d cry, and scheduling time together to just hang out.

The relationship is far from perfect. I still have some things that I need to decide what I’m going to do about. But I’m tending to the vineyard of our relationship more diligently now. And the difficulty of the hard work of rebuilding serves as a vivid reminder to be careful not to not let this happen again in the other areas of my life.   

Now it’s your turn: What little weeds can you pull today in an effort to begin changing the areas of your life that have gotten to a place of scarcity and poverty? I’ll be praying that the Lord will give you the strength to make the necessary steps toward weeding and rebuilding this week!

Written by: Jaime Hlavin

Edited by: Tamara Sturdivant