Stroll for your Soul Day 5

An online resource adapted and used with permission from prayerbench.ca

Weather Report: What Grows the Grass?

Today's Weather 
Grass needs four important things to grow and in spring grass is usually at it’s ‘growiest’ best. With sunlight, moisture, carbon dioxide and soil temperature all in alignment, we can have a thick, lush carpet of grass. The good news is, that when we don’t have enough of one or more of these things our grass can still survive. 

Starting below the ground, grass roots pull water and nutrients from the soil, transporting the goodness to the tips of the leaves. This is where the growth happens. The leaves absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use sunshine to make food. The more food the grass produces, the more it grows. As it grows, it generously gives oxygen back into the air. When there’s lots of sunshine, the grass stores excess sugars and starch deep in the roots, saving the food for a little snack in the months when there’s not enough sunshine, moisture, warm soil and carbon dioxide for growing and the focus shifts to maintaining.

Weather with You 
Spring is a growing season. The growing grass reveals this to us.  We have growing seasons too, where we flourish and thrive and store up energy for ourselves as we grow strong and robust. We have maintenance seasons as well, where we must draw from these stores to manage our daily lives as best we can. And like the experience of the growing grass, the seasons turn and change, and a maintenance season becomes a growing season and the cycle starts over. 

As you go out to Stroll today, find a patch of grass to walk through, or look at the grass from your window. If you find the right grass and the weather is warm enough, why not take your shoes and socks off and walk on the grass with bare feet. If that’s too challenging, place a towel or blanket on the grass and sit down for a time. Reach around you and feel the grass with your hands. Pick a blade or two to hold as you continue your Stroll.

Ponder your current season. Are you in a growing season or a maintenance season?

What do we need to grow? 

• Good health for our bodies with rest and sleep, healthy nutrition and exercise and maybe medicines and treatments to help us become stronger. 
• Love and companionship, with people who walk with us, sharing, caring and bringing a warmth into our lives so we in turn can share this love with others. 
• Stimulation of new ideas, fresh thinking, creative pursuits, challenges and work that we enjoy. 
• An awareness of God as we draw from the source of strength we find in our faith. 

These four things; physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bring balance to our lives. We find very little in the Bible about Jesus’ growing years but perhaps this verse from Luke sums up the best of any growing season.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.  (See Luke 2:52 NRSV)

Ponder your own current physical, emotional, mental and spiritual needs. Pick a blade of grass for each need and name your need in a series of one word prayers, inviting God to be with you in your growing or maintenance season.  

Weather Blessing 
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Peace, Rev. Gail