One of the little things that I really enjoy about fall here is that it marks the end of the growing season for our lawn. For the last half-year, I’ve been riding around on my trusty John Deere riding mower, letting those blades spin as they kept my yard looking somewhat decent. We have very sandy soil here, and every pass of the mower subjects the blades to a certain amount of abrasion that gradually wears down blades (and that doesn’t include the times when I hit something that wasn’t meant to be mowed). So, the end of the mowing season means the end of the blades, and I will change them out for next year.
Yet because my blades are worn, and because the growing season is over, I will typically be a bit more adventurous with my last mowing efforts of the year. Instead of staying over the grassy lawn, I will stray into the edges, along the woods, sometimes even venturing into the woods to knock down some of the smaller brush that has popped up in recent months. I like how it looks, and it will stay like that for the next several months, so the blades that were past their prime provide me with one final effort – one that I would not have attempted when they were still in great shape.
I suppose many of us are not unlike those mower blades. When we are in our earlier and prime years, we need to keep working where we work best, precisely where it seems we were designed to work. To go beyond certain parameters introduces a level of risk that most find unacceptable, so we stay within the confines of what we know will work, expecting that our efforts will be needed on a regular basis. Yet as we get a little more wear on our bones, and having had a certain level of productivity in our lives, we begin to see that there is now less risk associated with straying outside of our customary realm. Hopefully, we begin to see opportunities to make an impact that exist beyond what we have grown accustomed to.
While this is definitely the case in retirement years, it isn’t meant to be limited to what you do when you stop working. However, it is meant to provoke you to consider what other things that you might be able to accomplish by taking your experience and applying it in other directions, whether they are directly related to your work or to some entirely new endeavor. This may well be the time in your life where the impact that you make isn’t simply felt for one or two weeks, at which point you are right back where you started. Instead, it may now be a time for you to take advantage of the change of seasons, where something done well now lasts long into the future.
There’s no sense tossing out the old blades as long as they have life, and as long as I can get some use out of them. I feel the same way about myself. Lord willing, I’ll keep spinning until I’m worn down and useless, looking for opportunities that I never would have considered when I was younger, while expecting that my efforts will reap benefits long after I have been fully used up. Perhaps there’s still some life left on your blades as well that can be used to make a lasting impact.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron