My mentor, Linda Bartlett, (click here to see her blog ) has always taught that one of God’s roles for men is to provide a covering for their wives. This covering, among other things, can be provided through physical protection or spiritual leadership.

This year, I purchased my first lawn mower. As I’ve done a couple of times already, I poured too much oil into the reservoir. Needless to say, when I started the mower, it looked like I was laying down a smoke screen to hide an invading army. My pride took a big hit…what would the neighbors think? What’s wrong with Ed: he can’t fill the oil properly and when he does it wrong, he can’t figure out how to drain it so it wouldn’t look like the subdivision was burning down!

So here I was, ready to give up and have the repairman come out again. Yes, again, because he’d already been out earlier this year when I ran over a tree stump in the backyard, a move that killed the blade and sheared something off (and I have no idea what that was). My wife was beside herself. Not only did we have the cost of buying a new mower this year, we’ve already had to pay to fix it once already. Her anxiety rose, her spirits dropped.

So I worked in a cloud of smoke and mowed the lawn. I buried my embarrassment and focused on getting the grass cut to an acceptable height. Someone once said to me that owning a home and doing the DIY jobs around the house was worth the pain and fatigue because you could be proud of the a job well done at the end of the day. Not really.

Rather, at the end of the day, I thanked God that I was able to provide my wife with a covering in the form of peace of mind. Even if it meant walking behind a cloud a smoke for an hour.