I mowed my lawn. It was a humid, sweltering, ninety-two-degrees day. I had two lawn mowers–both the pushing kind. As a person who needs more exercise, I had refused to purchase a riding lawn mower. Pushing the mower forces me to sweat, and at the completion of the weekly ritual, I experience something mysteriously sacred about the mown lawn. For all the university president work I do, this single ritual most acquaints me with God. I’m not sure why.
My lawn-mowing career began as a child at my grandparents’ home. They had beautiful Saint Augustine grass. The name suggests holy grass. They owned an ancient lawnmower that had no motor. It had a twirling set of cutting blades that spun round and round, equivalent to the speed with which it was being pushed. The faster you pushed, the better it cut. Mowing their yard was a group exercise. With twenty-seven cousins hanging around, we each pushed until we couldn’t breathe, and then the next cousin took over. I cut my mowing teeth on that old mower.
Then I graduated to power mowers. At age twelve, my cousin Eddie and I started a lawn-mowing business. We were fast, dependable, and cheap. And we were willing to sweat in the Mississippi summers, which were hot enough to fry eggs on sidewalks. We made decent money on every yard… except one. Uncle Felix was my grandmother’s brother, a widowed man who lived alone. My dad insisted that we help Uncle Felix. He paid us ten dollars to mow his yard, but we burned up two motors cutting it. Uncle Felix was extravagance-challenged, aka cheap. He would let us mow his yard only once a month. By the time we got to it, we were practically baling hay. We mowed it about two feet at a time, pushing the tall grass down with the front of the mower, then lowering the blades into it slowly, trying not to choke the motor. It was tortuously slow work. This yard did not acquaint me with God. I almost learned to cuss… which taught me that the kind of work some people do seems distant from God.
Our business was otherwise successful. I saved over $2,000, paid cash for my first year of college, and bought my first car. Those were the good old days. The summer of my junior year in college, Lawrence Golden and I ran a lawn-mowing business. But we had moved up in the world of grass. We had a truck and trailer, a riding mower, two push mowers, a weed whacker, and a stand-behind, self-propelled Gravely mower. We had a few residential yards, but our primary business was huge apartment complexes. As partners, we hit it early in the morning and worked until late in the evening. We earned money for college. I have always believed that my education “took” because I sweated to pay for it. One’s work either fills the soul with joy or sours the heart, and what we buy with the fruit of our work reveals what we consider to be valuable.
I’ve always mowed my own lawn. Friends have explained to me that I earn enough to hire someone to do it, that my time is better spent doing college-president things, that I am robbing immigrants of work, that a seventy-year-old man should not work in the Tennessee heat. They could be right. I still prefer the old push mower. However, I broke down and bought a riding lawn mower for my wife, Denise. She likes yard work, and as partners, we can mow the entire lawn in ninety minutes. Doing sacred work with someone you love is a bonding experience.
We used to have a neighbor whose lawn needed mowing. She lost her husband, and her relatives were vultures. It seems that everybody she dealt with was out to take advantage of her. She didn’t know much about car repair, air conditioning units, technology, or contracts. Eventually, she lost her house. So we mowed her lawn. I suppose some forms of work are successful only by taking advantage of people. Their work steals hope from a woman who has already seen enough hard days. So, we try to watch out for her, which also acquaints me with God and seems a sacred thing to do. When we serve a neighbor without compensation, this may be the sweetest work of all. Love of neighbor is about as law-fulfilling, life-embracing as it gets. And sacred too.
Work is a place where divine/human encounters are played out. On one hand, it is a sacred partnership with God that occupies us in tending God’s creation. On the other hand, it is cursed by the fall as we labor by the sweat of our brow to eke out a living. How the same act can be both gift and curse is a mystery. And our work can be done in likeness to God: creative, loving, life-embracing. Or it can be done like the devil: stealing, killing, and destroying. Work is eternal. We will be judged by the quality and imprint of our work. Our work follows us into tomorrow, and yet it is temporal. We all retire at some point, one way or another.
The next time you mow the lawn, listen carefully. God may be instructing you on the topic of work.
Dan Boone, President, Trevecca Nazarene University
