I love the greening of grass in Spring. It amazes me how our slow-growing warm season grass, dormant and hay-colored all winter, gradually transforms into a vibrant emerald with rising temperatures and frequent rains.

Our neighbor has a deep green fescue lawn that is easily knee high. As I write, I hear the hum of mowing, a signal that the hired men have arrived to bring his overgrown grass into compliance with neighborhood standards lest the Homeowners’ Association threaten a fine.

In suburbia, a lot of effort goes into grass.

My neighbor is paying people to cut the same grass that he also paid them to plant last fall in a multi-step production that involved workers scraping the yard to bare ground, adding rich new soil, puncturing the ground with a bazillion little holes, sowing seed and covering it all with straw.

In less than half an hour, the neighbor’s grass is reduced to ground level.

Our lives are a lot like that grass.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away (1 Peter 1:24)

Our everyday lives have the illusion of permanence, like grass that grows unhindered month after month. In a crisis like the current COVID-19 pandemic, that illusion is stripped away and we come face-to-face with our certain mortality.

Though unpredictable, death is visibly certain and indiscriminate.

At first, the spread of Coronavirus seemed an affliction of the affluent, people who traveled on planes and cruises, frequented the better restaurants. Then it began to spread across continents and every demographic. Some victims recovered while others died within days or hours.

The infected/ill and infected/asymptomatic include actors, musicians, lawyers, school teachers, nurses, bus drivers, nursing home residents, children, pregnant people, the young, the old, the middle-aged, the previously healthy and those with underlying health conditions.

They have one thing in common: they are human.

We are all human. All mortal. Like grass that is mowed, everybody dies. Yet, God has set eternity in our hearts and made provision for us mortals who reverence Him.

As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
When the wind has passed over it, it is no more,
And its place acknowledges it no longer.
But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him,
And His righteousness to children’s children,
To those who keep His covenant
And remember His precepts to do them ~ Psalm 103:15-18