Grounds for Improvement

There's something fundamentally good about tending the earth for its betterment. 

For a little extra money in college, I worked for a landscaper in my college town of Lynchburg, Virginia—planting, hauling, trimming, weeding. It was just like working outside for my parents whilst growing up, except I got paid with bills instead of by being reminded that I was being given free room and board. Years later, once I left my job at an outdoor retailer and began freelance writing, I needed something to temporarily fill the rest of my hours each week. Naturally, when an opportunity to hop back into landscaping came along, I jumped at it.

Planting, hauling, trimming, weeding.

It was refreshing. Digging my hands in the dirt again.

New York pastor Timothy Keller talks at length in his sermon Can Faith Be Green about how God has made man to cultivate things to a fuller potential, and one of those things is unequivocally the ground.

Maybe that's why it can be so gratifying to plant something and watch it grow, to harvest and eat something you've cultivated, or to teach someone else how to propagate something effectively.

Maybe that's why God made taking care of the earth one of the first two commandments He gave to man.

I certainly think so.

So, when I moved into a delightful little duplex in a downtown Orlando suburb, I decided to truly dig in and enrich the ground around me. You may argue that I went a little overboard, planting over one hundred plants into the yard of a home I don't even own, but I think I've added just the right amount.

I believe that doing such is honoring to the Lord, helpful to my gracious landlord, and making an investment for someone's future—though that someone may be me, a future tenant, or even that gregarious raccoon from the massive oak tree out back. I simply hope that someone gets to bear the fruit and the enjoyment of the things I've planted; but regardless, I'll be grateful.

Is that because I've long been tending the ground and am simply used to it? Maybe. Or maybe it's because the want to do so has always been inside me—inside us all.

I absolutely think so.

That is why, whether I get paid in dollar bills, room and board, or nothing at all—I'll always have the satisfaction that there is just something "right" about gently coaxing plant life on the planet to be it's best. I thank God for that connection and responsibility.