Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Col. 3:2

I wasn’t meant to hear it, but I did.

“What did you say?” I asked.

They averted their eyes. I had heard them. They were pretty sure that I had, too. What they said was, “They’re so heavenly minded, they’re no earthly good.”

Looking back, I think those men might have been talking about me. You know when people are talking, and then they see you and look away, as if they haven’t been talking?

In my early Christian life, I found myself bringing Jesus or prayer or something I had just read from the Bible into discussions where those critics didn’t think such things belonged.

There he goes again. He doesn’t know any better; he’s just a kid. He’ll grow out of it.

Around the same time this happened, Mr. Edmonds, the husband of my mom’s friend at work, suddenly collapsed. They thought he would die. My mom became preoccupied with his health. At night, she would call her friend, who wasn’t going into work, to see how he was doing. Even though we did not attend church every week, my mom assured her friend of her prayers and concern.

He ended up living but was confined to a wheelchair. To help them out, my mom drove me over to their house where I would mow their lawn and do whatever else they needed.

I don’t think Mr. Edmonds liked me much at first. Actually, it wasn’t me, but I sensed resentment. He resented that he even had to ask for help, that he could not do what he was asking me to do. I admired the yard and garden equipment in his garage; this was something he had liked doing. He wanted to get up out of his wheelchair and do it himself. We both knew that he could have done the jobs he was giving me faster and better than I ever did.

Except he could not walk.

Mine was a different despair. I was tasked with digging out his pachysandra groundcover they had in one of their flowerbeds. The dug-out plants filled trash bags and was heavy work, not difficult, but really getting all the roots out seemed impossible. It just kept coming back. More stubborn than ivy or and dense as the most invasive ornamental grass. No matter how many roots I pulled, there were more roots underground than I could possibly pull or dig out. This was a task that I couldn’t imagine even Mr. Edmonds would have wanted to do himself. But he watched me work from the window.

I remember pulling and digging and pulling and digging at the pachysandra entrenched in the dirt. While I attacked the invader, I wondered about those men’s critique of “religious” people. No earthly good. People just thinking about heaven, about the God those men did not believe. What a waste, I could feel their mocking, their looking down on a youthful curiosity and enthusiasm about faith as some kind of association with inactivity. But I also wanted to think about heaven. I couldn’t help it.

There I was. My hands literally in the earth, doing yard work for a man who could no longer do it himself, worrying about the critique of thinking about heaven as somehow stopping me from earthly good. For Mr. Edmonds, my attempts to clean up his yard was doing earthly good. I was helping him.

But what I did not appreciate in the moment was that he was also helping me. This was God at work in both of us.

There is always the chance of being so earthly minded that a person might not be any heavenly good. The critique may be valid, or it could be a smokescreen for people who don’t want to think about heaven or anything on earth that is not right in front of them.

Truth be told, the heavenly and the earthly are fused in ways that we can’t see most of the time. But the life, death and resurrection of Jesus demonstrate for us that being heavenly minded can ultimately do the greatest of all earthly good.

Mr. Edmonds was kind to me, making sure I took breaks with lemonade, sweets and fruit. But I could feel his anguish and despair. He wished he could do what he watched me do for him. We became friends. He wrote references for me. Sometimes, he listened to me talk about my faith. He didn’t look down on me because of what I believed. We also talked about books—his interests were quite different from mine. That was okay. We didn’t have to be like one another to listen and respect the other person.

True good is both earthly and heavenly. It’s pulling weeds for a man who cannot walk. It’s giving hard work to a young man just starting out. You do such things without knowing for sure how it’s going to turn out. And it’s talking and thinking about heaven and its king at the same time as you do such things. By the grace of God, do good, even when you can’t stand up on your own or dig out all the groundcover or stop people speaking ill of you because Jesus is changing you into something new that you or they have never before seen.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. Matthew 6:19-20