The Parable of the Dandelions

For Wilshire Baptist Church

I mowed the lawn for the first time last week. While the grass is still mostly dormant, the weeds are in full bloom – especially the dandelions with their bright yellow flowers and tall stalks topped with wispy white seedheads.

If you’ve ever mowed dandelions, you know they don’t go away without a fight. The flowers — pretty but invasive — are close to the ground and usually escape the wrath of the blade. The stalks, on the other hand, stand tall and defiant as if to taunt you. Accepting the challenge, you push the mower forward thinking “this’ll get’em,” only to look behind you and find many of the stalks have simply bent over and popped back up. So, it takes several passes of the mower from different directions to cut them down.

Dandelions grow quickly, the result being that a day after mowing, many have renewed themselves as if they hadn’t been mowed at all. Yesterday, a week after the first mow, instead of mowing the entire lawn just to cut the dandelions, I went after them with the weed whacker. That actually does a better job than the mower, but it takes a good eye to make sure you’ve found them all. This time around, I found myself squatting like a golfer measuring a putt to locate the stalks that had escaped.

This morning, I stepped out and found many of the dandelions had grown back overnight again. I’ll continue attacking them with mower and whacker until they’re gone. But it won’t be me that finally eliminates them; it will be the warmth of the sun as the daily temperatures rise.

I know I’m not the only lawn warrior who battles dandelions in the spring, nor am I the only person who has battled other irritations, inconveniences, worries and hardships that keep coming back time after time. It’s part of the living of our lives that we have to keep fighting and battling some things until we can claim victory. Even then, victory may not be what we wanted or expected. Sometimes we have to learn to live with the thing we’d rather live without.

It’s in those times when courage to endure, prayer for change, and faith in God’s plan are the weapons of choice. In the end, it’s the warmth of the son that brings resolution, peace and rest.

By the way, it isn’t the heat from the sun alone that kills dandelions as the weather gets warmer. As it turns out, dandelions are very resilient and can survive in a wide range of temperatures. But, the warmth of the sun awakens the dormant grass, which absorbs the water from rain and sprinklers and eventually overtakes the dandelions.