November has a way of slowing people down. The mowing season is winding to a close, the leaves are finally letting go of the trees, and a lot of our clients here in Lufkin and Nacogdoches find themselves standing in the yard a little longer than usual — not working, just looking. There’s something about this time of year that makes people reflective, and around A1 Lawn & Landscape, that reflection tends to land in the same place: what does it actually mean to take care of a piece of land?
We get asked from time to time why a lawn care company talks about faith at all. It’s a fair question. But for us, it’s not a marketing angle. Billy Forrest started this company on the belief that how you treat the ground under your feet says something about what you believe — and if you go back to the very first chapters of the Bible, you’ll find that belief has deep roots.
In the Beginning, a Job Description
Genesis 2:15 is one of the first things we ever learn about human purpose: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” That’s it. Before the fall, before sin entered the picture, before any of the brokenness the rest of Scripture deals with — humanity’s first assignment was land care.
What’s remarkable is what’s packed into those two verbs, “work” and “keep.” In the original Hebrew, “work” is the word abad — to cultivate, to labor, to serve. And “keep” is shamar — to guard, to protect, to watch over carefully. Put those together and you get a job description that’s still exactly right for anyone who owns a yard, a farm, or a flowerbed in East Texas: cultivate it AND protect it. Produce something from it AND guard what’s already there.
That’s not a small distinction. A lot of people think of land in one of two ways — either as something to be used up for what it can produce, or as something to be left alone and never touched. The Genesis mandate rejects both extremes. It says the ground is meant to be worked, actively and skillfully, and it’s meant to be kept, carefully and responsibly, at the same time. That’s the tension every good gardener, farmer, and lawn care professional lives inside of every day.
What “Dominion” Actually Means
A few verses earlier, in Genesis 1:28, God tells the first humans to have “dominion” over the earth. That word has taken some criticism over the years. Back in 1967, a historian named Lynn White Jr. published a widely read essay arguing that Christian “dominion” thinking was actually a root cause of ecological damage — that treating the earth as something humans rule over gave people permission to exploit it.
It’s worth taking that criticism seriously, because it pushed a lot of Christian thinkers to go back and look more carefully at what “dominion” meant in its original context. And what they found is instructive. The Hebrew word behind “dominion,” radah, shows up elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe how a king is supposed to rule over his people. That’s the key. A king’s rule was never meant to be about exploitation — it was meant to be about justice, protection, and care for those under him. A king who used his people for his own gain wasn’t exercising legitimate dominion at all. He was a tyrant.
The same logic carries straight over to how we’re meant to treat land. Dominion isn’t a license to strip a piece of ground of everything it has to offer and move on. It’s a call to rule it the way a good king rules — with responsibility, with an eye toward its long-term health, and with genuine care for what’s been placed under your authority. That’s the standard we try to hold ourselves to on every property we touch, whether it’s a quarter-acre lot in downtown Lufkin or a five-acre spread out toward Nacogdoches.
A Christian Case for Environmental Stewardship
That debate over dominion theology didn’t stay confined to academic journals. It made its way into the evangelical world in a big way through a 1970 book by the theologian and pastor Francis Schaeffer called Pollution and the Death of Man. Schaeffer’s book is widely considered the founding document of evangelical environmentalism, and he wrote it, at least in part, as a direct response to the criticism that Christianity was to blame for ecological carelessness.
Schaeffer’s argument wasn’t that Christians should adopt secular environmental politics. His argument was simpler and, honestly, more compelling: Christians should be leaders in caring for creation because creation actually belongs to God and has real value simply because He made it. In his words, “Christians, of all people, should not be the destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect… We should treat each thing with integrity because it is the way God has made it.”
That line has stuck with a lot of people in the green industry, us included, because it reframes the whole job. A patch of St. Augustine grass, a young live oak, a bed of soil that’s been compacted and neglected for years — none of that is just inventory. It’s part of what God made, and it deserves to be treated with the kind of care that reflects that.
The Land as a Living Community
Around the same time this conversation was picking up steam in Christian circles, a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and essayist named Wendell Berry was making a similar case from a different angle. In his 1977 book The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Berry wrote one of the more striking lines you’ll find on the subject: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life.”
Berry wasn’t writing as a theologian, but his agrarian philosophy carries a similar weight to what Schaeffer was arguing. For Berry, caring for land was never just an economic transaction — plant this, harvest that, move on. It was a moral obligation. He treated the land as a community to be served, not a resource to be exploited. And when you’ve spent as many years as Billy has out on East Texas clay, watching what happens to a lawn or a landscape bed when it’s cared for properly versus when it’s neglected or overworked, that idea rings true. Healthy soil really does connect everything else — the grass, the trees, the flowerbeds, even the drainage and the water table underneath it all.
Soil Shows Up All Through Scripture
It’s not just Genesis. Jesus himself leaned on farming and gardening imagery constantly, because it was the world his first listeners lived in every day.
In the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-23), Jesus describes a farmer scattering seed across four different kinds of ground — a hardened path where the seed never takes root, rocky soil where it sprouts fast but can’t survive, thorny ground where it gets choked out, and good soil where it produces a real harvest. He wasn’t giving a lecture on soil science. He was using something his audience understood intimately — how ground condition determines outcome — to describe how people respond to the Word of God. But the metaphor only works because everyone listening already knew: soil quality matters. You can’t get a harvest out of compacted, neglected ground no matter how good the seed is.
Then in John 15:1-8, Jesus describes himself as “the true vine” and his followers as “branches,” with the Father as “the vinedresser” who prunes the vine so it produces more fruit. That’s not generic imagery — that’s the language of someone who knew viticulture up close, the patient, sometimes painful work of cutting back a vine so it can grow stronger later. Anyone who’s ever pruned an overgrown rose bed or cut back a crape myrtle in late winter knows exactly what that feels like. It looks like loss in the moment. It’s actually preparation for growth.
What This Means for How We Work
We don’t bring this up to be preachy about it — we bring it up because it’s genuinely the foundation of how A1 approaches every job we do. When we talk to a homeowner about soil health before we talk about seed or sod, when we recommend a slower, more sustainable irrigation schedule instead of the quick fix, when we take the time to test and amend clay soil instead of just laying turf on top of it and hoping for the best — that’s not just good horticultural practice. It’s an outworking of a much older idea: that the ground you’ve been given to steward, whether it’s a business or a backyard, deserves to be worked skillfully and kept carefully, not used up and moved past.
That’s the difference between a company that sees your yard as a transaction and one that sees it, and treats it, the way it’s meant to be treated.
The Bottom Line
From the very first chapters of Genesis, the pattern has been the same: cultivate and protect, rule with justice rather than exploitation, treat what God has made with integrity, and understand that the soil beneath our feet connects and sustains far more than we usually give it credit for. Whether you find that convicting, comforting, or just interesting, it’s worth remembering the next time you’re standing in your own yard, wondering whether it’s worth the extra care. It is.
A1 Lawn & Landscape proudly serves Lufkin, Nacogdoches, and surrounding East Texas communities. 📞 Call 936-635-0555 for a free estimate.
Author: Billy Forrest
