Zoysia Grass

In 1963 I went to work for an old lady out in the country sixteen miles from my house.  A farmer next door who knew my dad got me the job.  Miss Vogel had a five-story stone house dating back to 1770.  She had fifty acres of property with seven acres of grass to mow - a full-time job in the summer.  Miss Vogel had prize-winning irises that I had to set out each spring.  She had this shovel-shaped edger to make clean lines in the sod along the side of the beds of her precious bulbs.  One Saturday when I left for home, I took a shovel-full of discarded zoysia grass sod with me that I had dug up.  I put it in a bare spot in the front yard of our house.  It caught on and grew.  The next year the spot was almost twice as big.  By the time I graduated from high school in 1967, it was the size of a car and was a luscious green carpet.  My dad bought a plugger and began moving plugs to the rest of the yard.  When I was back in Maryland two years ago, I visited my childhood home, and the grass was gorgeous!  The entire half acre property was covered with a green carpet of zoysia grass.  And all of that had started from a single shovel-full in 1963 - fifty-five years earlier!  Hey, just as everything in life, small beginnings can have big results.  A single conversion to Jesus can have a positive effect upon children, grand-children, and great grand-children in future generations.  But evil acts can also have far-reaching results.  Hey, what you do will have an effect on many, many people!  Moses said in Exodus 34:6&7, “… The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and … visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”  Your testimony, or the lack thereof, will touch your children and your grandchildren.  Be careful what you do today, because in the coming generations, you will be very happy … or very sad.