The Weekly Parable

Some grasses are pleasing to the eye—fescue or Kentucky bluegrass, for example—and others just aren’t. Where I live, people tend to have lawns with the nicer grasses. But the less appealing grasses try their hardest to get a foothold and then take over.

Yes, you have a variety of leafy weeds like dandelions and bindweed, but then you have grasses that act like the attractive ones but don’t look as nice and spread far more quickly.

Last year, some of this grass (which is something like orchard grass) took hold along one edge of my backyard along a flower bed. I or my wife would pull it out, trying to avoid breaking the roots off. But it started to spread into the lawn. I noticed it early on, but I didn’t do anything about it. By the time I decided to try digging it out, it had worked its way through several square yards of lawn.

Over many evenings, I worked with a spade to get underneath the roots and pull them out along with the undesirable grass. But then I lost motivation before I could get rid of all of it, partly because blades of it sprung up again in places I’d removed it. It felt like a losing battle.

Fortunately, my wife was also developing a plan for reworking our front and back yards so there’s less grass and more plants that don’t need much water. Our region is in a drought, and we want to reduce the amount of water we’re using. So reworking our yard will allow me to remove the problematic grass.

I couldn’t help thinking while I was working to remove the orchard grass that if I had done something about it when it had just barely started to get into my lawn, I would have saved myself a lot of trouble—and of course that’s a parallel with sin or bad habits in life. If we can catch ourselves starting to get into something displeasing to God and change it while it’s small, it’s a lot easier to eliminate.

If we wait too long before starting to offer resistance and remove the problem, it can feel like a losing battle.

If it gets bad enough, then it may take an overhaul like reworking my yard to get rid of sin. It may take a complete change of surroundings, associates, or other influences. A completely new life.

President Russell M. Nelson, the Lord’s prophet, has taught, “The word for repentance in the Greek New Testament is metanoeo. The prefix meta- means ‘change.’ The suffix -noeo is related to Greek words that mean ‘mind,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘breath.’ Thus, when Jesus asks you and me to ‘repent,’ He is inviting us to change our mind, our knowledge, our spirit—even the way we breathe. He is asking us to change the way we love, think, serve, spend our time, treat our [spouses], teach our children, and even care for our bodies” (“We Can Do Better and Be Better”).

Just like the right time to remove something invasive from my yard, the right time to repent is as soon as possible.

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^{Photo by Karol D on Pexels.com}

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