Clearing the Woods

Every now and again, an amazing day presents itself and either you do something silly, like start a fire and burn the woods down, or you doing something else, like work for the entire afternoon clearing out brush. The woods behind our house actually belongs to the ministry, but since we don’t do anything with it, we have incorporated that area into our prayer garden. Full of poison ivy and oak with many dead limbs and rotten trees scattered about the floor of thick leaves, it’s not the prettiest sight in the early spring, when you can see it naked and unclothed from its leafy summer attire.

I ran a few errands this morning and when I got back, I thought I might tackle a small area that I wanted to get finished for this year’s clearing project. Every year we want to get a little more done so that in the end, the whole area will be free of all the dead wood and brambles. Well, I got a little ambitious. It happens sometimes when you get on a big front end loader that you feel invincible – plowing through dead trees and moving piles of sticks. It’s a great feeling. Nothing can stop you … until you slam into a big stump that is remarkably more solid than it looks. But in the end, the whole area that was a mess, is now really nice and clean and open. All the dead stuff is gone, the floor raked, and it looks so much better.

So while I was doing all this manual labor, getting my hands dirty, straining my massive muscular arms, and no doubt getting poison ivy, I was thinking how this is a good thing to do in life as well. Whether it is cleaning out the basement of all the stuff you don’t use, or cleaning our your junk drawers, or just getting rid of relationships that are not positive, I have a feeling that is what the author of Hebrews was talking about when he said that while we are running this race we are throwing off all those weights that slow us down. Clearing the woods is a form of purging – it is cleaning out the debris that has accumulated on the floor, making it hard to enjoy walking though, causing you to stumble. And once it is gone… wow, how great it looks again! How free it is to have the space to appreciate the trees, to be able to walk and see the new plants coming up, to smell the fresh dirt mixed with the old leaves. Ah yes, spring has come, and with it the newness and freshness of change.