When I was growing up, my parents had a lawn which was roughly the size of Rhode Island. My job was to keep it mowed. I hated that lawn. Every week I’d be out there with the mower. No self-propelled job either. I was nearly old enough to move out of the house when they got their first rider.
Many years later, my Mom and my Dad were still caring for these small football fields. In fact, they had INCREASED the size of the lawn! I asked my Dad one day why he didn’t maybe change things around, you know, maybe pave it, or turn it into a bark or crushed rock farm, since they were getting older. His answer astonished me. He said, “No, I really enjoy taking care of it.”
My mouth opened and my jaw hit the floor. “You mean you made me mow the lawn all those times and you LOVE doing it? Why didn’t you do it then?”
My Dad smiled and said, “Well, I like it now that I’m retired and don’t have to work all week.”
I realized then how shortsighted or one-sided my perspective had been, and had remained, even when I had become an adult. Of course, it made perfect sense. My parents worked hard all week providing for us. It made perfect sense for them to have me mow the lawn and share the burden. It also made sense that later on they got pleasure out of caring for their lawn and making their home look nice and enjoyable for them. I had been stuck in my own little view of things. Amazingly, although many years had passed, I still held the same views. I hadn’t even thought to change my views, because they were my views and therefore must be right. Why review them?
I wonder how many things in life we can say this about. We develop our views on things and they then become the “right” view. They may be things we figured out when we were 10 years old, but we haven’t re-thought them since, because the idea that our views might periodically need maturing, never really even occurs to us.
Maybe it’s time for all of us to take a breath and think about who we are, and what message we’re sending to others. Is it the message of Christ, or is the message of self? Perhaps we have perspectives that can be changed and/or improved to more clearly reflect the love of Christ into the world if we are willing to view our own perspective in the light of someone else’s; especially in the light of Christ’s perspectives. Blessings!

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