Building Bigger Kingdoms

I'm standing in our backyard, watching our dog Joey lick the last remnants of the strawberry banana smoothie I just drank out of a cup his snout was never meant to fit into. Oh how we try to get things that are never meant for us! Kim and I have been doing a lot of work on our backyard and behind our fence. Ripping up vines and dead trees and leves and thorns. It's a really rewarding job- you get to instantly see your progress. And for whatever reason, the people who built the fence in our backyard built it 23 feet shorter than our property line. So over the years all that space behind our fence has become overgrown with all kinds of plants and thorns and used as a trash dump. So far we've uncovered the wreckage of a barbed wire fence, bricks, cement pieces, tools, tiles, bottles and cans, trash bags, oil cans, even a speed limit sign! An saince out fence is more rotten than not, Kim and I had been planning to move the fence back about 20 feet. But as I look out on our yard I think about the value of making that space on the other side of the fence into a garden for our community. Instead of annexing the space and adding another 1500 square feet of backyard, what if we cleaned it up and used it to establish a really nice vegetable garden that could be shared with the neighbors? That's be a better use of space and would infuse more love into our community. It seems obvious none, I just can't believe it takes us so long to get to the point of thinking of others. My natural inclination seems to be bent on simply building a bigger kingdom for myself. Lord, teach us and train us to build Your kingdoms instead of our own.