Pride in my lawn

I never really understood the vanity and attention that some people seemed to pour into their lawns. I also never imagined that I would ever be someone to have that kind of investment in the land surrounding my house. After this last weekend I am beginning to think that this might change. One of the flaws in the new house my wife and I purchased is the fact that instead of having nice lush grass, or really any grass, it was instead a weed covered desert. Yes, I do mean desert as in sand. One of the requirements of our purchase agreement was that we put in a lawn to make the city of Baxter happy. This meant a debate of how to best accomplish this. We talked about sod versus seed and decided that while sod sounded easy it was also really pricey. So instead we bought some seed, ordered some dirt and set to work. With the help of my parents we weeded 12,000 square feet of yard, pulling up anything that might get in the way of the new grass. Then once the dirt had been delivered and spread over the yard we set to work raking it to loosen it up for seed. After going over the entire yard with the rake we then started seeding, first horizontally and then vertically. Once the seed was on the soil it was time to once again go over things with the back of the rake in order to push the seeds into the soil and help them get started on their quest for life. Finally, after going over the yard time and time again, all I have to do now is water it as much as possible. Suddenly I have a great more invested in having a nice green lawn. Because of the effort I have poured into this I really do care about what happens to it. I think in our society we have a tendency to move towards specialization and that means that a lot of us, myself included tend to pay someone else to do jobs then spend the time doing it ourselves. While this does leave us free to do other things it lessens our investment in things. When we look to others for solutions we lose some of our attachment to the results. This is fine for a lot of things, even for lawns, but when it comes to things like ministry, we need it to be hands on, we need to have some attachment to the results. That is why I am really leaning to the notion that my job is not to be a specialist in ministry, but instead an empowerer of others to do ministry, so that all of us can have an attachment to work of God that is being done in the world.