*This is not an endorsement of any piece of equipment discussed hereafter.

I was so tired when I got home from work. I’d been up since 0500, but I was not tired from physical labor. Actually, I enjoy physical labor, especially working in the yard–anything to do with the soil, trees, plants, etc. I was tired from what I call “administrivia.” I had had to do a lot of that today at work.

My Mondays tend to be like that–paperwork, management of resources and people, looking at demographics, and kind of seeing not the people themselves but rather pieces of data on a spreadsheet.

And I’m a chaplain and pastor. People are what I love–their spirits, and what undergirds their worldviews.

But today had been one of those Mondays where I was spent–just worn out from administrivia.

But when I finally got home at 1900, CJ met me in the garage.

“I have something for you,” she said.

She knows what I like, so I was suddenly in better spirits.

She walked me to the back deck. She’d purchased a Ryobi limb trimmer.

I was ecstatic.

Some might laugh. Really? they might think. Something to work in the yard?

Yes. Exactly. I love this sort of thing–something to get me outside, where my spirits lift; something to keep me in touch with the smell of trees, even if it’s to prune their dead limbs.

So that’s what I did. I went out with her, and got to work. Thirty minutes later, I had felled several dead limbs, burned them in the firepit, and even watered some new trees I had planted.

Small things, I suppose, is what I’m driving at–the small kindnesses that are done for us, things that move us, things that bring us joy. For some of us, it’s trees–pruning them, trimming them, planting and watering them. And saying ‘thank you’ to the ones who love us enough to know when we need a boost so that we flourish.