Cutting the Grass and the Delight of God's Creation

Yesterday, on my day off, I mowed our front lawn. I have found over the last year that I love mowing the lawn, which is a surprising statement to those who know me well. I used to hate even the idea of mowing the grass (my mom can surely attest to this). Surely there are more important things to do than cut grass...it just grows right back anyway! Have fun outside; I'll do something productive, like reading a book.

But my attitude ignored that the God I claim to worship and love is both a creator and a cultivator. When God created the heavens and the earth, we're told that they were formless and void. But then God took the disorder of the created world and molded it into something beautiful.

And after creating the first man, he told Adam to do in the Garden what God had done in the whole world: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). God brought order out of His disordered world; now He calls Adam, and all who are made in His image, to reflect that image in their stewardship of the created world.

Which brings me to cutting the grass. Even though I hated the idea of doing it, there was always something in me that looked at a freshly cut lawn and could see, 'This is good.' Who likes to walk or drive by a lawn that's overgrown, nasty and unkempt (like this photo to the right, which is not what my grass looked like before the cut yesterday!)?

In the last year I've learned that this feeling of satisfaction is multiplied greatly when I am the one who did the cutting. When I finished mowing yesterday and looked back on my 'handiwork', I had a sense of satisfaction that a tiny slice of God's creation had been made a little more orderly.

And I thought to myself, 'I wonder if this is a taste of how God felt, after the sixth day, when He looked at the vast universe that He had created and exclaimed with boundless joy, "This is very good."

Of course, God created me to do much more than just cut grass as a way of bearing His image. He's called all Christians to preach the good news of Christ's life, death and resurrection. Cutting the grass will never accomplish such a task. Nevertheless, I believe God is honored when His people fulfill even their most ordinary tasks (like mowing the lawn) with the joy of knowing that we are doing it for His pleasure. Indeed, I believe it's a way of sharing in the pleasure that He has in the goodness of His lavish creation.