WET GRASS

I know, and any of you guys or ladies who cut your own grass know too, that WET GRASS can be so exasperating! For those of us who live in the Sun-Shine state daily showers are a given. It’s a race to get the grass cut before it rains again, but not before the lawn has had time to dry out. What are you going to do? The grass has to be cut even if it’s wet.

First of all it’s a given that you can’t use your mulching attachment. (Grass has to be blown-out from under the mower through a side shoot.) A second given is that you must take half cuts if you want your grass to be cut evenly. Finally, to avoid excessive clumping, you can cut in large rectangles blowing the grass away from the center patch.

Being a professional landscaper, I’m sorry to say that even with these few tips, grass clumping will still be inevitable. So what’s a guy to do?

1. Start with Sharp Blades. Dull blades will only prolong an already punishing task. Proverbs 27:17 likens iron sharpening iron, to one man sharpening another. Often when cutting wet fields, landscapers will follow behind each-other essentially double cutting the same grass, breaking-up the unavoidable clumps left behind by the first mowing. Almost any difficult or challenging task can be made easier by enlisting support.

2. Double or Triple Cut. To have a nice-looking lawn you simply have to break up those unsightly clumps. Stretching the grass analogy a little further all of us have HEART-GROUND that has to be broken up. Hosea 10:12 exhorts us to, “Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and showers righteousness on you.” Why is it that those heart issues like, greed, jealousy, and pride have to REVIEWED or REVISITED over and over again?

3. Clean the Inside. Not the inside the engine but under the deck. You know that big area where the blades spin around. That place where all the stinky dead grass and dirt pile-up, for you to pull out by hand. No matter how clean or new that sparkling engine looks, unless we get on our hands and knees and pull out all that crud from under the deck we are going to keep spitting out clumps. That reminds me of the verse in Luke 11:39 when Jesus tells the Pharisees, “You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.” It seems that no matter how good any of us look on the outside, if we are still hanging on to the cruddy things on the inside we’ll remain ineffective.

4. Engage the Wind-blower! Even when you apply each of these tips, if the grass is really wet, you will still have some clumps or clusters of grass. That’s when I find it extremely helpful to employ the power of the WIND! From a landscaping standpoint, that means using the strongest blower I can find. Spiritually speaking, only the Spirit or WIND of God can ultimately break us loose from the crud and junk that hold us back in life. John 3:8 tells us that “the wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

Although friends can sharpen us in the same manner that sharp-blades help the mower improve its potential; we must individually be willing to break-up the clumps of crud in our hearts that keep us clogged and unproductive. Just taking a look inside to see what blocks our effectiveness is useless, if we don’t man-up and actually remove the nasty crud. But for many of us “the crud” is so jammed inside of us that only the WIND of God can dislodge it. As our Music Pastor often says, “no matter how much we can perfect our own NATURAL abilities; we still need God to put his SUPER on top of it.” (That’s how we become SUPERNATURAL.)

Have a GREAT WEEKEND, even if you have to cut – WET GRASS!