Thirty Julys Of the Same Grass

The mower is a Snapper that was secondhand when he bought it, and it starts on the third pull. Never the first. Never the second. Delmar Fitch has been pulling that cord three times on a Saturday morning since the year his daughter finished high school.

Thirty Julys.

He does the front first, because the front is what people see from the road, and then the strip along the ditch, which is the worst part because of the drainage tile and the way the ground rolls. Then around the propane tank. Then the two maples, which have gotten big enough now that he has to duck.

Then the graveyard side.

There are eighty-some stones on that side, mostly from before nineteen forty. He does the whole thing with the push mower rather than the rider because the rider will chip a stone and he saw a man chip one once, thirty years ago, and never forgot the sound.

Row six, fourth from the fence, is Ardith. His wife. Nine years now.

He mows around her stone the way he mows around all of them, and he does not stop, and he does not say anything, and he has not felt one single thing standing there in a long while. He noticed that about himself two or three summers ago and it bothered him for a week and then it stopped bothering him, which bothered him more.

Here is what Delmar would tell you if you got him talking, which you would not, because he does not talk.

He cannot remember the last time this meant anything to him.

There was a stretch in the beginning where it did. He was newly on the board and it felt like something to be useful. Somewhere in there it turned into Saturday. Now it is a thing he does between the coffee and the hardware store, and the truth, which he would not say to the pastor and has not said to anybody, is that if he examined himself for warm feelings about God on a Saturday morning in July he would come up with about as much as he came up with last Saturday, which was nothing.

This particular morning a young father named Trevor is in the parking lot with two kids and a car seat and a diaper bag, new to the church since Easter, waiting on his wife.

Trevor calls over and asks how long Delmar has been doing the lawn.

Delmar says thirty years, more or less.

And Trevor, who is twenty-nine and does not know what he has just said, says: so it has never once looked bad my whole life.

Delmar stands there with his hand on the mower handle.

He had never thought about it from out on the road.

You have a Saturday.

You have something you keep doing that used to move you and has not moved you in a long time. Showing up. Making the meal. Sitting through it. Reading the chapter. Being the one who unlocks the door. And somewhere along the way it went quiet inside you, and you have been carrying a private worry about what that means, and you have not asked anybody, because the question sounds like a confession.

You are inside a company held together by a covenant Christ keeps, and it does not run on how anybody in it feels this week. That is what the written word says about the church He purchased, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your inner temperature on a Saturday morning, who keeps that true while you push a mower.

What the verse actually asks for

Paul is writing to a church at Colossae, which is to say a body of people, and everything in that chapter is written to a group. Put on compassion, he says. Bear with one another. Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which you were called in one body. Corporate the whole way through.

And I want that stated plainly here, because it is what this site is built on. The church is a people: the whole company of everyone who belongs to Christ, in every century and on every continent. A nation, a household, a body, a flock. It is not a private arrangement between Christ and one reader, and it is never a romance. Whatever is true of that body is true of every ordinary person standing in it, including a man in work boots on the graveyard side. Scripture never shrinks that down to one person's private feelings, and His Spirit is the one who joined every ordinary member to it.

You were called into one body, and your Saturday morning is standing on that call rather than on your mood. Colossians 3 puts it in those words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a call given to a whole church hold up one man in work boots.

Then in the middle of a passage about ordinary daily work, this:

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.Colossians 3:23

Read what it asks for and read what it does not.

It asks for the work to be done. It asks for the direction of the work to be Godward: as for the Lord. It does not ask you to feel a certain way while you do it. There is no clause in that sentence about warmth, and none about sincerity of emotion, and none about the state of your heart at seven forty on a Saturday morning in July.

You are already doing this as for the Lord, and the direction of it does not change on a morning when you feel nothing. That is written in Colossians 3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person's work Godward when the person is not consciously holding it anywhere.

Dry is not distance

Now let me take something off you, because somebody has probably put it on.

There is a way of talking about the Christian life that reads a flat feeling as a symptom. You are dry, therefore something is wrong. You are dry, therefore you have drifted. You are dry, therefore go find a way to feel it again, and if you cannot, examine yourself further. It sounds like care and it functions like an accusation, and it has put a weight on some of the most faithful people I know.

Here is the plain thing. You are not being graded on feeling, and dryness is not evidence about your standing. Scripture is full of people serving God with no glow anywhere on them, and the psalms are largely written by men who said so out loud, and the Holy Spirit is named as the one holding a believer rather than the sensation a believer can detect.

And I am not going to hand you a regime, either. This is not the part where I tell you to get up earlier, or add a practice, or start a journal, or restructure your mornings. If it were, faithfulness would just be a heavier version of the same Saturday, and you have enough Saturdays.

You have a standing today that is exactly what it was in the year this used to move you. The written word puts the whole footing of the church in what Christ did rather than in what anybody managed to feel about it, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that footing under a man who has not felt anything at a graveside in three summers.