And Just Like That: A Tender Mercy

The other day, just after learning that we would not be receiving any paychecks for the entire summer, my husband and I ran a couple errands before the girls came home from school.

One of those errands was to go to Sears and check out lawn mowers.

I know that might sound a little hypocritical, given our current financial situation, but we don’t have one and we have been scouring Craig’s List and yard sales to no avail. Our yard was starting to look a little too jungle-like for comfort and short of taking the hedge clippers and doing it by hand, something needed to be done.

So we thought we’d head to Sears and just look. See if we could swing it somehow in the budget, even though we knew we probably couldn’t.

But first, we had to run to the grocery store.

While we were there we ran into a member of our branch who said, “We were driving past your house the other day and we wondered if you needed a lawn mower?”

(Yes, that is how bad the weed garden that was our lawn looked.)

He continued, “Because we have an extra one that you can have.”

It was all I could do not to break down and bawl right there in EconoFoods, but I sure felt noticed and loved by the Lord right then. Especially since a lawn mower probably isn’t really much of a need in the grand scheme of things. We don’t have a HOA to fine us for not mowing, and many of our neighbor’s lawns looked just as jungle-like as ours did, but the Lord still cares about our lawn and knows of our desire to have it look nice. And for our children to be able to play in the backyard without getting eaten by weeds that are taller than they are.

And that’s how it came to be that we acquired a lawn mower on Saturday morning and now have a perfectly respectable looking yard.

A Tender Mercy if I ever saw one.