Love is the best sin weed eater

Sin is a stubborn weed that plants roots in our heart that we never quite get rid of. Rebuke is the weed eater that skims along the surface, and where successful lops the top off the weed and keeps the ground looking tidy for appearances sake. However, it leaves the root intact, and the ground above still spare with plenty of reserves below and fertile room above to grow back.

Love is the seed that God and others plant in our hearts, and we in others. Love takes over the ground that sin would claim and makes it its own. It is a slow and steady lifelong bloom, but if tended to correctly (this seed is so amazing it feeds off itself to beget more of itself) pushes sin from the ground it claims as a matter of course. As we grow in the attending of our own hearts, with a mind to how that helps us attend others, the beauty of this bloom, the diversity of form, colour, and nourishment it brings to the soil, gives us a focus for what the rest of the garden should look like.

Those who are parents or work life long spans with people at various levels of dependency know that sometimes, for the sake of order, and to clear the ground to plant love, rebuke is needed. This is the purview for people who tend the hearts of others long enough to know the cycles of seasons and the best time to plant seeds through a journey of empathy and fellowship and/or parenthood.

But for we who pass each other on the corridors of life, who connect only briefly and often superficially over the Internet or other mediums, surely love is always the seed we plant if we care about sin. If we focus on sin through rebuke we give power to it, and do so without knowing the root of the weed in the other person’s heart. It provides nothing to tear the top off of sin if the person walks away the next moment. 

Love is the seed that plants itself in ignorance of the sin. Its purity ensures its supremacy, the beauty being that what seeds we may sow in another may not bloom until many years later, but still starve the weed of life as love  hungers for righteousness. Love is the seed you can cast another person’s way, and even if they depart from you, they carry it with them.

So which would you choose, the machine that hungers for weeds? Or the seed that hungers for righteousness? Which do you think produces better results in the long run?