Yard art is a curious thing. If your front yard is adorned with one of those wooden cutouts made to look like the hind end of a large woman bending over, please don’t take offense, but seriously, what were you thinking?
I mean, do you want passersby to think that is YOU out there pulling weeds with your behonkus on display?
And while I’m at it, what’s up with putting plastic chickens in the front yard? Real or plastic, I’ve never thought chickens enhance a home’s curb appeal.
Maybe I never developed a healthy appreciation for yard art because I didn’t see much of it in my neighborhood during my formative years. But I was certainly exposed to the genre when I visited my grandparents who lived in a small town that featured an inordinate number of yards displaying large, colored, shiny balls on concrete pedestals.
“Got one of those shiny ball art things for your yard yet? Got us one last Tuesday,” one friend might have said to another down at the IGA store in Worthington, Indiana. Before long, a wave of yard art peer pressure must have rolled through town and the shiny balls started appearing everywhere.
I witnessed a more current and bizarre display of this phenomena recently on a drive up to northern Greenville County. My husband and I ventured up that way to get a humongous, rednecky truck that my husband bought …which is a whole other column that is screaming to be written. Winding our way up into the Blue Ridge foothills, we passed one pasture, then another, and then another that all had life-size cow statues in them. One even had a pair.
Yea, that’s right. Fake cows with large horns, just standing there in their respective pastures, looking out at the road, big as you please. I did a double-take each time I saw one and it took me a moment to figure out that the cows were fake. But yes, indeed, they were.
I had never seen even one of these statues in a pasture before, let alone four of them along a short stretch of road. Heaven knows how many counterfeit cows were on display around them thar parts.
I could only guess that the local feed and seed must have been running a special on bovine statuary – a deal too good to pass up, evidently. I wondered if the statues were supposed to be aesthetically pleasing or if they served some higher purpose, like coyote bait or something. What do I know? I’m a city girl.
You know what bothers me about this? About cow statues, plastic chickens, wooden bending-over people? They are fake. And on the whole, I don’t like fake.
Yard art is no big deal, so if you enjoy it, go for it. It’s your yard. Just don’t let fake creep into your heart or your words or your life.
Jesus got really ticked off at the religious phonies of His day.
Sadly, people like that are still around. They are parked on church pews every Sunday, right alongside folks who truly love and want to follow Jesus Christ with all their hearts, minds, soul and strength.
Like those cows in the pasture, at first glance, it may be hard to tell the plastic from the real, but sooner or later, it becomes evident.
God is after the real thing. “Those who worship must worship in spirit and truth,” He says. (John 4:24).
I didn’t think anything could look sillier than plastic cows standing in the middle of a huge pasture, but come to think of it, something does – plastic Christians sitting on pews every Sunday.
Let’s be real.