Fighting alfalfa

When we moved to our current home, we literally carved living space out of an alfalfa field. If you're not familiar with alfalfa, in the West it's a common livestock feed which is cut, dried, and baled for storage.

Our location in Colorado is technically called a desert and the farmers here get crops largely by supplemental irrigation. Or they use dryland techniques to tease every ounce of moisture out of the ground.

That was the case with our alfalfa field. It hadn't seen more than rainwater for many years.

We assumed that tearing it out and building a home would be relatively easy.

But that crazy alfalfa keeps coming back!

We build a flower bed over one patch of alfalfa after hoeing it out. We added 18 inches of dirt to the box - and the alfalfa pushed through that.

It is impossible to pull alfalfa by the roots. Those roots have run deep to some private source of water. I may have a new look at eternal life after wrestling with alfalfa for five years. Those plants seem equipped to live forever!

If you've read Psalm 1, you remember the writer's word picture regarding a tree planted beside a stream of water. It goes like this:

... a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither... (Psalms 1:3)

Our alfalfa is like that with roots finding some stream of water that allow it to grow in spite of my opposition. It overcomes serious attacks because it is rooted in water that gives it life.

I have looked at Psalm 1 as a sweet introduction to the Psalms, but my battle with alfalfa reminds me that we will have serious skirmishes in our lives. We will be opposed by forces. We cannot survive unless we have deep roots into living water.

What's the living water? Fortunately, the psalmist anticipated that. Living water is God's Word.

Do we cling to God's Word with the tenacity of my alfalfa? That Word is not a sweet treat - a donut to start my day. It is what keeps me alive.

Delight in the living Word today.