Spring is here!!!

Finally it’s here! I was getting to the point where I thought I would never again experience warm weather and now I can finally walk outside in a t-shirt and shorts. When it starts getting nice out we all know what happens to the grass…it turns a beautiful green and becomes very lush, and when that happens it is time to break out the Walker Mower and start mowing.

Mowing is a passion of mine that started about five or six years ago when I was mowing my mom’s grass every week. It felt soooo good to look back at the lawn after it was mowed and see every blade of grass cut evenly, to see long straight lines in the lawn, and the smell of fresh grass. This passion of mine got fueled even more when I started working at L&M, everyday at 7:00 in the morning I would drive a my fellow partner, Adan, and a huge trailer with two beautiful Walkers on it and head to Denver to mow Quest properties and Home Depots. I learned how to mow quickly and efficiently due to the fact that we had a certain number of properties to mow each day; I learned where to place the outer wheel of the deck on line that I just mowed, that made it so my stripes were nice and wide. I eventually became a string trimmer champion being able to evenly cut a small patch of grass with ease and trim around sidewalks both ways (left handed and right handed). Although I did not think very highly of it then, I really enjoyed waking up early in the morning to go mow green lawns; the smells that accompanied me in those mornings still linger around in my memory. I spent two full summers doing this job, it didn’t pay as well as I would have liked but I got some awesome experience on the mowers (probably around 15-20 hours on a mower each week) and I learned how to drive a truck with a huge trailer attached to it through Denver traffic.

Last year I got offered to work at THE Walker Company….THE Walker Company!!! I got to use some of the best mowing machines with some very nice decks. L&M taught me how to mow quickly and efficiently because we were on a deadline so when I started mowing at Walker I was FLYING on the mowers. Eventually Dean Walker told me it’s okay to slow down a bit so I started slowing down and really focusing on mowing precisely and straight. Eventually I was mowing Dean Walker’s lawn!!! This is a big deal to me because this is the master handing over his territory for me to mow for him! The best mowing job I did was right before the Walker Reunion, I mowed the north lawn (the biggest lawn) with the 56” deck, I believe, and I caught all of the grass which is something I don’t usually do. My lines were spot on straight, I so wish I took a picture of it because it was one the most beautiful things I have ever seen. This summer I am going to be trying to mow the Walker “W” or the Walker logo into the north lawn, not mention some other cool mowing patterns that I have up my sleeve.

I walk around campus in the morning and I can smell that they have been spraying and putting down fertilizer and all I can think of is hopping on a mower and cutting some grass.




8 more days till SUMMER!!!

A relationship

This year of school has been all about relationships for me, from making new friends for the first time since pre-school, to talking to my professors, to my break up with Kelsey. It’s all been about relationships, Mr. King told me during a round of golf “Meet as many people as you possibly can while you are at school because you will never get another opportunity to meet that many new people in your life.” (I smoked Mr. King in that round of golf by the way…). I like to think that I have made plenty of new friends at Olivet (please let me know if I have not). I have ended a major relationship this year and I have started another, and thinking about this has led me to realize that what is really going on with my walk with Jesus.

I was talking to a friend of mine who was struggling with keeping up with his daily devotions and prayer. I told him that this….this thing that we have with God is not just something, it’s a relationship, we are not praying to something, we are praying to somebody. Even though I was the one saying this it opened my eyes too, God and I have a relationship…when I think about a relationship I think about Kelsey and I, how much it brightened my day, how much she loved me and how much I loved her, how it changed my lifestyle. I take that and I look at my relationship with God, that relationship doesn’t even compare to what I have right now. This realization came before Easter weekend and boy am I glad it did because it made it into the most touching Easter I have experienced. I stood there at the Good Friday service and was almost brought to tears, three days later I stood in the Easter service and was overjoyed. I finally felt what Easter was always about; I was consumed by the emotions that Easter brings to all Christians. All of the Easters in the future will no longer be about the basket that I get in the morning, the candy, or the Easter eggs… it will be about Jesus and the cross. “Thank you God!!!”