Cult of Brighter Days Dispatch on Coping and Hope, by Bishop Sara of Sunshine and Sass
Life, right now, feels like a lawn that hasn’t seen love since the Reagan administration. Overgrown, chaotic, buzzing with unseen terrors — the kind of place you half expect to lose a flip-flop or discover a new species of mosquito. The weeds are winning, and despair spreads faster than crabgrass in July.
When I need to cope, I don’t turn to wine or yoga or even prayer candles. No, occasionally my sanctuary is… lawnmowing videos. I will happily confess my devotion to SBMowing and his gospel of weed whackers and mercy.
Now, part of this fascination might come from geography. I live in Arizona. Which means: rocks. Desert landscaping. A cactus if you’re lucky, gravel if you’re not. My “yard work” is basically chasing tumbleweeds with a broom and making sure the scorpions don’t unionize. I do have a golden lemon tree to maintain, but that is a story for another time. Watching someone else tame a lush, grassy jungle feels like stepping into a fantasy novel. For me, lawnmowing is like Narnia — magical, distant, and involving a lion (or at least a roaring mower).
There’s something miraculous in watching a jungle of grass be tamed. One moment, the yard is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The next, it’s so clean you expect Martha Stewart to materialize and host a cookout. The transformation isn’t just aesthetic — it’s spiritual. It’s proof that chaos can be defeated by one person with a mower and the audacity to believe in edging.
And here’s the kicker: the recipients of this free lawn care may or may not be “worthy.” Sometimes they’re struggling, sometimes they’re just tired, sometimes they’re fine, and sometimes they don’t even bother to say thank you. But the mower cuts anyway. No applications. No proof of worthiness. No forms stamped by the Department of Deserving. Just the hum of a weed whacker and the radical idea that care does not have to be earned.
That, my friends, is grace with a gas engine.
And when I watch these videos, I’m reminded that even in this dumpster-fire circus of a world, people are still out there choosing to do good things simply because they can. Not because it’s efficient. Not because it’s profitable. Not because the recipient passed a background check. Just… because.
That’s the kind of hope we cling to in the Cult of Brighter Days — the wild, irrational hope that people will still show up, do something kind, and leave the world a little tidier, a little brighter, and maybe smelling faintly of fresh-cut grass. It proves our first tenant, just be kind.
So when doomscrolling gnaws at your soul, take a break and watch a yard be resurrected. Listen to the mower sing its hymn of gasoline and glory. Let the sight of neat stripes in fresh grass convince you that somewhere, good people still roam the earth, armed not with swords but with trimmers.
And maybe that’s all salvation really is — someone showing up with a lawnmower and saying, “I got you.”
🌞 May your weeds be few, your hope freshly trimmed, and your soul lined with neat diagonal stripes. 🌱
—The Cult of Brighter Days
