Anyone Need Their Grass Cut?

From time to time I will republish a post I’ve written in the past. The post was originally written and published in October 2012.

Sometimes you start a simple task or job and it grows into something bigger. I have certainly experienced this at times in my life.

ask-julie-what-proper-mowing-height-grass-1-copy

One time we had a water leak in our vacation trailer.  I decided to see if I could fix it myself.  I checked and found the problem needed to be fixed from the outside, which meant peeling off the metal shell at the front of the trailer.

I started at the bottom and noticed the problem extended a little higher so I took off the next strip, then the next, and the next.

When I had the whole front of the trailer removed, with just the wood frame left in place, I stepped back and thought, “What have I done?!”  It was way more work than I had thought.

Another time we had a leak in our basement.  I thought I would dig a hole outside and patch the foundation where the leak was.  In the end, the hole I dug was over 5 feet deep and about 12 feet long.  Again, that job got way bigger than I had first thought!

Reading about those two experiences, you might think they weren’t that bad, and that I must be a handy guy.  That’s where you would be VERY wrong!  I’m not that handy, and for all the handy work I have done, I don’t really like it.

It takes me too long; I don’t have the right tools; I make mistakes; I get frustrated; I get discouraged; I cut myself (another story).

Recently, we were at our cottage on a rainy weekend, when we happened to get a break from the rain for a few hours.  I decided I’d better take the opportunity to cut the grass since we wouldn’t be back for a few weeks.

It’s such a small piece of lawn that the job really doesn’t take much time.  But, as I was running the lawnmower over our grass, I thought about my brother’s lawn.  He had left his cottage a few hours earlier in the rain and I had noticed that his lawn needed a cut.

Since he’s up at his cottage almost every weekend and often cuts our grass (because we don’t get there all that frequently), I thought it was my chance to return the favour.  So, when I finished our lawn, I walked over to his place and started to cut his grass.

As I got close to finishing, I started to think about my brother’s neighbour who’s wife had just had surgery and was in intensive care at the hospital.

I thought, “That guy doesn’t need to be bothered with his lawn”.  So, as I finished with my brother’s lawn, I just kept going and worked on his neighbour’s.

As I walked back to my place pushing my lawnmower, I realized this was one of the few times a job that got bigger didn’t become frustrating or discouraging.  In fact, I walked with a sense of satisfaction that I had, in some small way, been a help to others.

Here’s the thing:  One of the greatest ways we can show the love of God to others is not by telling them but by showing them.  The problem is it takes time and, for many of us, time is precious.  We don’t have a lot of extra time to allow the task or job we are working on to become any bigger.  But sometimes that is exactly how we are to “love one another as I have loved you” John 13:34.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: What kind of “loving one another” acts have you done recently?

What Everyone Ought To Know About Maintenance

The word “maintenance” has a tag-along emotion for me . . . it’s called frustration.

I get frustrated with maintenance because I want to enjoy the thing that needs to be maintained; I don’t want to work on it.

Bike Maintenance

Bike Maintenance

I want to use something and not have to care for it or fix it. In the 80’s I didn’t want a PC because you needed to know DOS and a series of commands and what pressing the “Ctrl+Alt+Del” keys did. I just wanted to use a computer, not figure out how it worked.

I like to ride my bike; I don’t like cleaning it. I want to just pull the cord on my lawnmower and start cutting the grass. I don’t like having to scrape the grass off the undercarriage or keep it tuned.

The problem is, in the last week, my avoidance with maintenance has accentuated my frustration. I broke the chain on my bike, probably because I didn’t clean the gritty oil off it.

My lawnmower is having a hard time starting these days and it’s not cutting evenly because it needs a tune up and a wheel adjustment.

And my computer needs some file maintenance soon or I will run out of space on my hard drive.

This was all fresh in my mind when I watched a little 3 minute video on how to clean your bike after a ride so it’s ready for your next ride. The guy on the video said you could do it in five minutes, but somehow (through the magic of video, I guess) he showed us in three.

I’m almost convinced that I need a new attitude toward maintenance, but for that to happen I really need a new emotion to go with the word. I’ve been thinking of some emotions that I could associate with maintenance – emotions like affection, confidence and satisfaction … but I can’t seem to trick myself and instead I feel annoyance, contempt and suffering.

Some people love maintenance, maybe even more that using the item. But not me. I know my things would last longer if I had a warm, fuzzy attachment to the word but it’s just not that easy. I can’t turn a switch on and like it.

I thought of a couple of solutions. I could give away my stuff when it needs some maintenance, and just bless people with things that sort of work. But that would require me needing a lot of money to replace my items.

Also, I could farm the maintenance out to people who like doing it. But that too would be costly and I would be without my beloved whatever, while it was being serviced.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution for me that works. I might have to do maintenance even though I don’t like it, even though it frustrates me. I might have to just discipline myself in spite of the piggy-backed emotion that comes with the word.

Here’s the thing: Relationships, like with things we own, require maintenance. We might like the idea of just enjoying our relationship with God but to maintain that relationship, we need to connect with Him, grow in Him and serve Him. That kind of maintenance might seem like work that we might not want to put our energy into, but maintaining our relationship with God will require us to discipline ourselves in order to connect, grow and serve.

That’s Life!

Paul

Question: How disciplined are you at maintaining your relationship with God?  Leave your comment below.