Winterize Your Lawn

“A smooth, closely shaven surface of green is by far the most essential element of beauty on the grounds of a suburban house.”
– Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, 1870

“Whatever.”
- Me

I live in a relatively new housing development in Phoenix which means at least one thing: I have a very small yard. About 10 x 15 in the front and maybe 25 x 20 in the back… something like that… These yards are irritatingly small. They’re only useful if you have very little children or you are very little yourself… like Frodo little. So here I am with my hobbit yard trying to figure out if I’ll put winter grass down this year. Not sure why. It’s just another expense but everyone else on the street keeps doing it and my kids don’t need anymore neighborhood embarrassment. They’re already disturbed enough by the inferior amount of Christmas lights we have and heaven forbid my resistance to putting up Halloween decorations! Where do these people get all this time to decorate for Halloween? They’re killing me. My kids already have a dad that says, “No dogs and no adopting babies from Mexico.” And now they have to deal with me saying, “No, I’m not buying any goofy scary cutoff at the elbow arm hand light things and then spending an entire Saturday scattering them evenly around the front yard in order to spread the Halloween cheer.” Good Lord. How much Halloween cheer do we need? Anyhow… So, OK, I’ve winterized once again. Amazingly, even though we live in a desert the backyard looks like a bad episode from the Planet Earth series. We’ve got about 4,000 pigeons, doves and other smallish, riffraff birds feasting on grass seed. It’s like going into a Golden Corral or Western Sizzlen in some small town around lunch time… ever seen that? Folks just gorging on food… That’s what these birds remind me of. They do nothing else. They eat. Fly up onto the wall and look stupidly at me when I open the door shooing them away. Only to descend lightly and sweetly down to consume my lawn yet once again. I mean, I like birds and all (and I absolutely love the Planet Earth series. It’s on my Christmas list this year) but not the ‘Western Sizzlen birds’. They need to be out with the real birds like hawks and stuff, you know? They need to be out there fighting for life and limb with a fox over a piece of jack rabbit or antelope or something rather than eating all my grass seed. They don’t have my respect for being lazy and consuming my grass seed. You can't call that foraging. They aren’t real birds. In fact, come to think of it, that’s what I want. I want real birds. I want a backyard full of top-of-the-food-chain hawks or stinkin’ bald eagles. Or how bout like, a flock of condors crammed in the front lawn. Can you imagine the neighborhood on Halloween with little Johnny in his superman costume crossing to the other side of the street ‘cuz a giant California Condor is eying him? That’d be sweet. Wait, I’ve got it! That’s what I’m doing next year for Halloween. I’m getting grass seed that attracts condors. I’ll have a yard full of them and it will bring so much halloween cheer and be so scary. It will be awesome. And then I’ll win some award or something from the housing association and in a few years everyone will be doing it and then my kids will finally understand that their dad isn’t strange and barbarous. He just wants green grass during the winter.

and winged carnivores in his yard…

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Symbols

It’s Oct 18 and you can almost feel everyone gearing up for the holidays. People are getting busier. The weather is changing. (In Phoenix that doesn’t mean the cactus needles change or anything. It just means it’s not summer.) I’m starting to see symbols of the coming holidays. Halloween symbols. Thanksgiving symbols. Christmas symbols. (Last night my boy, Evan, noticed a Christmas tree up in a window of a department store. He’s six and he said, “It’s not even Halloween yet and they have a Christmas tree up!”) Symbols are important. In many cases they can become iconic… The pumpkin, the cornucopia, the Christmas tree, etc…

And then there’s the greatest icon of them all: The Cross. The cross, of course, was devised to powerfully demonstrate Caesars dominance to any who would dare to challenge him. It was clearly effective. Yet it’s not the most iconic symbol of all time because of the power of Caesar. It’s iconic because Jesus gave up his power. Think about that. Jesus endured arguably the most gruesome, humiliating death ever devised by man not to dominate but to liberate... not to win but to lose. How many people really know that truth? How many people really understand the freedom of “losing to win”? Not enough and I’ll give you one (though there are doubtless others) good reason why: Because (as Brian McClaren says) the cross still gets used in Caesars way, to win… rather than in Jesus’ way, to lose.

Domination has been apart of the human race from the beginning. We employ it in order to create power groups. Cain over Abel. Hebrew over Gentile. Romans over Non-Romans. Whites over Blacks. And on and on… In spite of what Jesus died for often times it’s no different with those who call themselves Christ followers. Domination and power are a part of our DNA. In the church it’s not hard to find people enamored with creating a power-caste system. Those who have “obviously” sinned are always on the bottom. You know that group, right? The fornicators, the murderers, the thieves, etc… Those who have sinned “less obviously” tend to get promoted. That group would include the gossips, the lustful, the manipulators, the schemers, etc… It’s a huge mistake because it reveals our selfish motive to use the cross to dominate. (And as C.S. Lewis reminds we assume the most scandalous sins are the ones of the flesh but Jesus always portrayed the worst sins as those of the heart.)

So, this holiday season, make a commitment to live after the way of Jesus. No political agendas. No power trips. No puffing up. No looking down. No domination.

Simply embracing, losing, giving up control and… peace.

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Judgments

Author, Ann LaMott says, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

In the church one of the more difficult things to do is to pass judgment on something or someone without coming across judgmental. Much of the reason why it’s difficult is because you cannot control how the other person will react. You can have all the pure motivation in the world but it may not stop them from receiving it wrongly. Tension from this kind of interaction can be so strong that it causes many people to shy away from any kind of perceived judgment call. Which at times is understandable but as a whole is unfortunate. Reading Dallas Willard recently reminded me that we cannot give up the important discipline of discerning motives, choices and ramifications of those choices in others to simply avoid being perceived as judgmental. So, how do we talk about the issues without attacking someone’s self-worth? Here’s one thought to keep in mind… Recently Pastor Mike Breaux of Willow Creek Community Church reminded me of what I’ll call the ‘flow of authority’ that is,

Authority
Accountability
Acceptance
Affirmation

When you’re subordinated to someone else you will often be subjected to his/her authority and because of that you will be accountable to provide something. If you provide something then you may be accepted and if you do it long enough you might receive affirmation. (But really, the bottom two are optional in the way it normally works in our society. Even in the church!) Now think about how Jesus viewed subordinates… radically different! In fact for Him, in almost every situation, it worked just the opposite. Initially he affirmed, then accepted, then held people accountable and finally called on their obedience in light of His authority.

So, which way does it flow for you? Do you demand respect because of your authority? Or do you approach it as Jesus did?

What I’ve learned, painfully sometimes, is that in those relationships where I approach people the way Jesus did… in a reverse ‘flow of authority’… I’m much more likely to be able to speak into their lives without hurting them or ostracizing them. It is not easy. It takes practice. It’s tense sometimes. But you will be healthier when you attempt to live in truthful, grace-filled tension because of sound judgments rather than forgoing them altogether. Now, even if you do that well it still wont stop some people from labeling you as judgmental. At that point, all you can do is to commit them to God, love them and not to relegate them to some kind of sub-class of humans that surely God hates. If you’ve already done that then read the Ann LaMott quote again… and start over.

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