Cutting Grass

My first job in High School was cutting grass and digging graves with the Department of Parks and Cemeteries. Yes, when it comes to ministry, I worked my way from the ground up.

Monday mornings remind me of my cutting grass days. There were some cemeteries so big that by the time we finished cutting the grass at one end it was time to go back and start cutting the grass at the very place you started. On Monday morning I usually look over the text for next Sunday's sermon. With "yesterdays" theme just fading I look at what might be next week's direction.

"Wait a minute, I just finished and now it's time to start again." It does feel a bit like that grass cutting syndrome but when I start working on the new text I realize that though the process is the same and yes it does feel like I just got through doing this, that the "field of grass" is different.

Then I remember that I'm not cutting grass or digging graves. This sermon stuff is way beyond routine, although if one is not careful it could become that after doing it for 37 years. No, the "field" in which I work is that place where people live and die but it is no cemetery. It is the place where people come to discover what it means to be... Out there in the middle of that field people will come to find God. It's not like cutting grass.

As I finish a sermon and know as I go home that I'll wake up the next day to "start over" I often wonder what people will take with them. I've learned that you never really know what impact your words may have. Sometimes it seems there is an immediate reaction that is helpful for one who listens and then there are those times when someone years later tells me what "happened" when they planted those words in their own field.

Well, you'll have to excuse me. It's Monday and it's time to go "crank up the mower."
Bless you
jody jseymour@davidsonumc.org