My family and I recently moved and we now have some landscaping in the front of the house we just moved into.  This is something new to both my wife and myself.  The house is a newer built home in a nice and quiet neighborhood.  The house had been vacant for sometime before we moved in.  Needless to say, the landscaping/flower bed was completely grown up with fescue grass, thistle, clover, and various other weeds that do not belong in a flowerbed.

As my wife and I were out in the "bed", we started to pull the weeds the best that we could.  While we were working a certain saying that I have heard many times and has been made famous by Mike Bickle from IHOP in Kansas City.  The saying is "pulling weeds in the hot sun."  This took on a new reality as we were doing this very thing.  I got to thinking about what this meant and then I started thinking about some of the kids in my youth group and how this would translate to them.

This was an excellent object lesson in that these are a representation of the problems and difficulties that we may and do face.  Some of them are big and will hurt you if you are not prepared to deal with them and have the right tools to deal with them.  That is the thistle.  Some of them come in clusters and are tall and if you deal with only one, the root is still there.  You have to deal with the whole group of it at once and pull it up by the root.  That is the fescue grass clumps.  Then there are those that are seemingly small and insignificant and you try to get rid of it only to find that it is just one of several issues that are tightly interwoven together and will drive a person crazy trying to find the root and start of the problem.  That is the clover.  Lastly, there are the ones that look to be big and grown into somewhat of a mature state.  You start to mess with it gently only to find that the roots are very shallow and it does not take much to rid yourself of these issues.  These are the random weeds that just seem to grow wherever there may be a spare inch of ground.

The more I thought about these as the evening went along, the more I realized that issues are there and must be dealt with, and just because I dealt with them at one point does not mean that I will never have to do it again. I just turned thirty and I am blown away by the kinds of things that I hear from teenagers and some of the issues they face on a daily basis. The things that generation Y are dealing with cannot be dealt with in a cookie cutter way.  They need mature leaders to guide them and show them the way, and not just give them the old "it's a phase" kind of answer.  We need to lift them up daily and pray for their physical and spiritual well being and for wisdom to navigate the troubled waters that lay ahead of them.  Pray that they will cling to the Rock and not be tossed about by every wind and wave that comes at them.

Please pray with me for the 20 and under generation.

In Christ,

YPM