Color Green's Song

"Be praised...

Look down upon this winter wheat

and be glad that You have made

Blue for the sky

and the color green

that fills these fields with praise"

~Rich Mullins

Lord, I join the color green's song. Fill me with praise for You.

Photos: taken walking our winter wheat fields...
Thank you, kind Amy, for sharing this song and praise ...

Common Stones

Our shadows stretch us long across this field, us bent low, rock pickers combing earth. This is spring's song. Always has been, as long as I can remember. It’s what I know and what those before knew, what those now coming are coming to know.




The ground moans after winter’s weight, working stones to the surface, and we, all of us, young or worn, come again with spring, pluck this sod, play this song. Fingers pry around hard edges, dislodge rock from soil beds, then haul limestone and granite to trailer. I watch us, silhouettes on dirt, scan, swoop, carry. We are outlined clay.


Here, it is clear. This is what we are, all of us without exception. Peel off the degrees, strip the careers, tear back the status symbols, this is who we are. We are dirt.

And in a moment I am twelve again, heavy with rocks, racing my brother in this same field, arms cradling rocks bigger I hope than his, to trailer heaped. Grandpa, near deaf, slows tractor, clutches, waits, but doesn’t idle back the throttle. Tractor engine screams for us to hurry, press harder.

We did. We do.

And now time’s raced on, returning Grandpa, returning him to the dirt whence we’ve all come, never to know these kids who walk this same soil, this same field, leaving footprints here too. But here in twilight, we somehow meet, dust bending down to touch dust.

“The earth is what we all have in common,” writes Wendell Berry.

In common with those in the past. In common with those in the future. In common with those now, all of us walking and living off this dirt beneath our feet. This earth, loamy and rocky, sandy and gritty, it’s where we live these now days, that from which we came, that to which we all return. We all return to our fathers, to what we all are.

“You picked this field, Mom?” Our 13 year-old future man pants the words, his arms too full, his face red with work.





“Every year. This ground’s been picked and picked and picked.” I toss two more rocks onto the trailer’s rising mount and think of the years of gilded harvests before the late autumn rains, the shift of clouds and winds, and white flakes falling, years of warmth returning, and us with it, to work up soil and pick these rocks, rocks, rocks.

“Is there a volcano or something underneath this field, just bubbling them up? Where do all these stones keep coming from?” His brother, sweaty, grimy, weary, hollers from the other side of the trailer. He’s kneeling down, both hands gripped to a stubborn one, thin muscles quaking it back and forth.

I laugh, motion him out of the way, kick at the embedded granite. “When I was your age, my brother, sister and I, we used to fill trailer load after trailer load with rocks and these crazy dreams of some spray we’d invent to disintegrate stones.”

Farmer Husband, wearing this mask of dirt, teeth smiling white, heaves a big one up to the trailer’s edge, rolls it in.

“You too? I thought only my brothers and I had those kind of wild ideas.” I look into those eyes ringed in dirt, and he into mine, and I remember him young, us farm kids, like these kids, us dreaming the same dreams.

Our oldest reaches up behind the tractor seat for the thermos and some cold wet for us all standing here for a moment. “Guess nobody can figure out a spray or anything better than just this, eh?” He grins, a raccoon of grime, then glugs that water down.

“Nope. This is really the only way. Bend down, pick it up, carry it off.” Farmer Husband takes his turn at thermos spout. He swipes away water dripping from chin with dusty, untiring arm.







“Just one rock at a time.”

I smile at the patch of skin he’s washed clean.

Just one rock at a time. Generations of us dirt-ones, bending low, picking up sin-boulders, asking Jesus to carry them off. Each growing season turning up more stony edges, more that needs prying, kicking out. So it goes for us who are dust.

It’s what we all, every one of us everywhere, have in common: this earth. These bodies of dust. This rocky soul soil.


We all must wrestle, wrench out, pray for Him to come do what we can’t do with these sin boulders so we can harvest a crop. Season after season, generation after generation, dirt dealing with dirt and all its stones.

All of us, we’re the same, working with Jesus on our soul fields.

We’re all just picking rocks.

Picking rocks with Him who does what we all only wildly dream of.

Working with Him who rolls the stones away.

Lord, I am just simple dust, dealing with a lot of rocks. Help me. Roll away my stones. And help me see what I have in common with all of us living after the Fall: that we are all just picking rocks, asking for Your hand.

Part two of Common to follow
Photos: us, dealing with stones

Mixing in Thanks...

"The great painter boasted that he mixed all his colours with brains,

and the great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks.

All goods look better when they look like gifts."

--G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

And isn't that what it all is? Gifts, good gifts, from His hand. I'm learning to mix my simple life with thanks.

:::

ground beef turnovers, wrapped while steaming, ready for the field

:::

Joshua volunteering to wash up the dishes while I pack meals

:::

farmers eating food on field's hem, resting for a moment from planting food

:::

dirt and kids and fed husband and that warm feeling of being alive

:::

looking at life in the rearview mirror

:::

barren fields ready to swell with seeds, life, yield

:::

cluck of a rooster and hens, children clucking too

:::

speckled feathers, stone-flecked barn

:::

Sunday morning coming down,

Little Girl waiting in light for Daddy, shoes, church

:::

living in Light, shoes on,

pilgrimaging towards Father, Heaven, Home.

:::

In need of joy's elixir? Take a moment and click through the Gratitude Community in the sidebar's blogroll. You'll be blessed. Nothing revives a heart like giving thanks.

Have you considered establishing gratitude as a personal soul fixture? Just grab a scrap of paper lying around and begin counting the blessings, with your own 1000 Endless Gifts:

Why begin your own One Thousand Gift List --(drop me a line if you do, and I'll add you to the "1000 Endless Gifts" blogroll in the sidebar-- we invite you to join the Gratitude Community!)

Read the listing of the endless Gifts

Seed Bed

She’s laid bare, exposed and waiting. We, all of us, watch as he stands on her tilled edge, opening bags, preparing to fill soil’s barrenness. Something about the sound of ripping out stitched string, hope and promised unsealed.

The open seed bags line the tailgate, ready. The truck bed sags under the heaviness of seeds, millions of diminutive, near-weightless-in-my-hand seeds. Across the field, edging toward us, the tractor with planter behind, seems to enlarge, grow up out of the dirt. Engine drones louder, closer. That horsepower’s filling earth’s emptiness with seeds, 16 rows drilling 29,500 embryos of life into every acre of naked ground.

Farmer Husband kneels down into land already planted. Like a prayer, he scrapes back the surface, searches.



“Found one.” The wind carries his voice to us sitting in the ditch’s grass. “We’ve got the depth, the spacing. Looks good!” His grease-creased hands move slowly, carefully, folding the seed back into its dark earth slumber.

Granules, sediment, is all she looks like. Dirt. Kick a foot at her, and she flies away, a cloud of dust. But beneath her, still and hidden, lies millions of seeds about to awaken, stir, burgeon, swell with life.

Farmer Husband’s brother backs up tractor and this planter empty of seed. Time to refill. These brothers, whose blood comes from a land far across the Atlantic Ocean, heft seed bags and pour into planter hoppers.

Little Girl stands beside me watching her daddy work, her cheeks full of apple, her hair riding wind. She’s standing on dirt I stood on as a little girl, watching my own Daddy pour seed to fill this farm with.

Seeds and dirt. Isn’t that what we are, really? Seeds planted deep into loam, growing, living, dying, dust returning to dust, new seeds planted. Seeds as many as the stars in the sky.

I reach down and touch her silken hair, touch all the children within her to come, and think of Abraham and Levi before Levi even yet was… and yet he was:

“Because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor,” reads Hebrews 7:10. The New Living Translation offers,“For although Levi wasn’t born yet, the seed from which he came was in Abraham’s body...”

Inside the frames, the bodies, the souls of our children, reside the children still to come. And the children then still to come. Like nestled dolls, future generations dwell within the child whose eyes I now look into, whose hands I now touch.

Stars in the sky, seeds in the earth.

We parent not one child, or even a few children, but every day, we parent innumerable, countless children. When I raise my voice, frustrated with a child, I speak to generations of children. When I wipe away a tear, comfort, listen, I honor centuries of children.

When we meet our children, children we will not live to meet on this earth, are, in very real ways, met, shaped, formed. Parented.

She bites again into white apple flesh, looks up with smiling eyes.

Face of clay, she is. Made of the dust of the ground. But, oh, the seeds within.

The planter drops back down into seedbed, heads across earth, and I take her hand and whisper a prayer.

God, give grace to tend her well.

More that Dies....

“As soon as you open the door, it hits you. ‘Ah, spring in the country!’ “ She laughs and offers her tousled red-haired daughter another cookie.

“Well, it’s like I was telling Emily on the way over here. There isn’t a block in the whole county that doesn’t reek today.”

The two friends chuckle and I nod and smile too, us this cluster of community at the back of a country church on a Wednesday night. The children’s club closing program has concluded and the church is all a bustle with happy kids nibbling on treats from the refreshment table, mothers talking of tilling up gardens, the fathers who are there and not on the seats of tractors, making plans for the work bee to reroof the church come Saturday morning. A toddler needs a refilling of pink juice so I take her hand and we weave through the crowd.

In the midst of the milieu of swirling children, I pour juice and revisit a scene, words, from earlier in our day.

On the headland of a dusty two hundred acres, I stood waiting for him. Tractor roars down the field, cultivator working up earth behind him. The wind flaps about skirt hem and the apron I forgot to slip off in my haste to get the meal to the field and his empty stomach. Are fields all over the countryside dotted with waiting farm wives, aprons flying on spring winds, arms full of food for work-worn men? The tractor looms, rumbles to an idling halt. He swings open the cab door. Large rocks he’s gathered from the last few passes across the field line the steps up to the cab. One by one, he tosses them off into a pile in the ditch, and I step close with his lunch basket.

Instead of raising his voice over the engine, he motions to his dirty shirt, my dress, explaining with hands why he thinks it best not to offer a hug. I laugh, him joining too, and he leans in to kiss this forehead. We rest there for a moment, lingering touch on the edge of a wind-blown field on an afternoon in late April.

Another tractor whirling down the gravel road in a cloud of dust, manure spreader behind, interrupts us. He steps back, adjusts his cap. “You know,” I raise my voice, “I was thinking of this on the way to the field. The fragrance of spring’s new life is that of rot and decay.” I nod towards the passing manure spreader.

Farmer Husband presses in close, his soft voice competing with the tractors. “True.” He points towards last year’s corn stalks wrapped around the teeth of the cultivator that he’s been pulling across this field all day. “Manure yes, but the more debris and dying matter from last year’s crop too, the richer the soil bed for this year’s crop.”

I look across the dirt stretching towards the horizon. We've spread manure over this land already, beginning of the week.

“Yes, more that dies, more that lives.”

He takes the lunch basket from my hand, brushes with a kiss again, and hauls back up into that tractor cab and waiting steering wheel.

But his words echo through the rest of my day, revisiting me here tonight in a full country church, us womenfolk talking of hanging out lines of laundry, working up sleepy gardens, and the countryside wafting with the smell of sweet manure.

“More that dies, more that lives.”

Out into the falling dusk, these church folks slowly spill, frogs of the church pond filling the night with their croaky chorus. And we all mingle under the shy stars twinkling, the air pungent with death, and I look at these people, a body of believers, a people called to live new life.

But the daily death comes first. The more that dies.....

The more He lives.



Scripture Drink:

"Could it be any clearer?
Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ,
a decisive end to that sin-miserable life...

What we believe is this:
If we get included in Christ's sin-conquering death,
we also get included in his life-saving resurrection."

Ro 6:6-11 MSG

Lord, my dying today may not smell pretty. But it is necessary for the new life You want to grow in me. Where can I die today? The more I die.... the more You live.

Hand Dwellers

Trust in the Lord and do good,
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. ~Ps. 37:3

This land marks our time.

The glow of lights in the neighbor’s dairy barn: “Martins’ must be having problems tonight—milk house light is still on and it is nearly 10pm.”

The tracks from our barn door to the back step: “We can eat soon! Dad’s done chores and is on his way in from the barn! Everyone sit down at the table!”

Time marked by gestating livestock: “Three months, three weeks and three days from now, we’ll be birthing 15 new mamas.”

Time marked by weather: “Calling for a hard winter. Wonder how the winter wheat is making out under this bed of white. Spring will tell.”

Time marked by crops: “Old crop soybean markets don’t bode well for the next several months—neither do new crop soybean markets.”

Land dwellers we are. Those who live in the land are powerfully aware of their own blazing impotence, how much of time they cannot shape, form, control. The cattle on a thousand hills are His---they may give birth and they may not. The clouds are His chariot---they may grant rain and they may not. Every head of wheat may grow because He causes all things to grow---or not. We are at His mercy. He hovers over the the face of our deep. We see Him, in all His terrifying glory, in all that we cannot do.

True, this land ruthlessly exposes our utter powerlessness. And yet, we know it: these pastures are safe, good. For in our impotence, we can lay back into the omnipotence of the All-Powerful God. Who knows what the pastures of 2008 holds.

These pastures, this time, is safe. If I choose to dwell in His hand.

Lord, why is trusting You so hard? If I dwell you Your hands, what can possibly go wrong? Maybe that's it... maybe, when I am scared, don't thinks its all good, I dwell in the wrong place. I think I'd like to move year. Be a Hand Dweller.

From the archives

New Year Hope

It seems an unlikely, but strangely right, place to spend the final hours of Christmas. While the planet twinkles in the glow of trees circled with plates piled high in shortbread and fruitcake, stacks of unwrapped love, and perfectly imperfect family, our Christmas night has us far away from it all. Far away in a barn. Sows grunt, piglets root and nuzzle udders for milky warm, and snow falls soundlessly out there in the dark.

I am supposed to be feeding these hungry sows chopped corn, soybeans, wheat, but the sounds mesmerize me into still: were these the first sounds of earth that reverberated in His ear drums? From the lofty, soaring arias of the heavenly host to this, this snorting of beasts, this banging of feed troughs? And the smells: from the incense that wafted through the celestial heights, to this air hanging thick with dung’s rank, dust’s heavy itch?

Hard to comprehend: God left kairos and entered into chronos through the means of a barn. Not to vaulted domes or marbled floors, but to a cob-webbed, manure reeking barn, a barn where most refined folk would not step foot in without changing clothes, without covering offended olfactory senses. I too wear a pair of coveralls, a hat over hair, my garb of protection. And I will shower out of this stench, washing away the stink before stepping out into the world. But our God isn’t antiseptic, carefully avoiding dirt, grime, stink. Of all the places on this spinning orb, He intentionally decided to clothe himself as a naked baby and birth his virgin skin onto a mucking bed for animals. God chose a barn as His entry point. A place into which we would hesitate to even carry a babe through, let alone deliver a vulnerable newborn, the very Incarnation.

Funny how the lights celebrating the birth of the Christ Child, God with us, still illuminate this earth when we begin to prepare for a New Year, a new hope. A new us. Standing here, slopping hogs, it seems so clear: such New Year hope is only plausible because of Christmas. Without the Babe who came to the barn, who didn’t hesitate to meet us in the rotting mess of our sin, the new year would only be a rehashing of the old year. The swaddled babe murmurs, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Every year when we rip off the last calendar page and begin time with a clean slate, the Barn Babe is still new, stretching, waiting to grow up in us.

He chooses our dirty places, our stinking places, the places that shame us, as His point of entry.

He does not disdain the barnyards of my life: the foul attitudes, the beastly ways, the dirty sins I attempt to scrub clean—to no avail.

The Christ Child enters our lives in the places where the flies buzz over refuse and dung and chooses to grow up within us right here. Knowing that the Babe of our barnyard grows up within us, our New Year has hope of being genuinely new, the potential of being transformed into Christ-likeness.



I take farming husband’s hand and we walk out of the barn and into the chill of Christmas night and out towards the New Year. Black velvet heavens seem warm, close, nailed up there with shimmering stars. Christmas night and the world seems hushed; even the children, clumped in pairs, whisper through the halo of bright from the barnyard light. I glance over at the sleeping orchard, winter white blanketing the feet of young trees.

The New Year about to be birthed has the hope of good fruit because of what was birthed in the barn. Because the Christ child will grow in us, we will bear new, good fruit. Visions of excellence, dreams of accomplishments, pursuits of perfection—these all will prove barren “for human efforts accomplish nothing.” Do you hear the Barn Babe who softly cries, “Apart from me, you can do nothing”? He intimately knows the muck of our lives, the stench we try to mask. The Child growing up in us is the genesis that produces any good fruit in us, for with Him abiding, growing, in us, we are connected to the vine that can make a year, time, us new.

I feel deeply settled somehow, here on the cusp of a New Year. The Babe, God Incarnate, isn’t repulsed by the rank of my life. It is precisely where He chooses to meet me. Precisely where He chooses to make me new. He will grow up in me as I listen to Him, trust Him, commune with Him, keep company with Him. Determination, resolutions, goals are well, good, perhaps even necessary, for a New Year …but nourishing the growth of the Christ Child within, this God-in-my-flesh, He is what transforms the fetid, squalid into health, wholeness, happiness.

My New Year’s may still smell of the barn. Which is exactly why it has Hope.


Father? Thank you for New Year Hope because of the Barnyard Christmas Babe. Grow up in me, Child.

Photos: suckling piglets on Christmas night

Hope at the Heart...

November blows bitter, trees naked and gray with cold. We straw the strawberries, pulling up warmth. We wrap the tender bark of the young fruit trees in a coat, insulation, protection from gnawing teeth, gnawing hunger.

I stand on the back stoop, tugging my coat tighter around my neck. A blast of cold tangles my hair with its icy fingers. But I stand a bit longer, looking across the fields, to the silos and barns over the knoll. Today I can feel it. This farming community bleeds, lifeblood soundless letting away on a somber day in November. I shiver. The face of this land falls ashen and barren.

Brows knit around farm tables, long talks in the dark after children slumber under quilts. Numbers crackle through the radio at noon, announcing the farm markets, the futures forecast, the cash basis and the Chicago price. Voices of farmers, friends, sit across the table for Sunday meal, voices of neighbors, pickups stopped alongside gravel roads, voices on other end of the phone, needing an ear to hear, someone too who has roots and hopes deep down into this dirt. We listen, we stand beside... this is our story too.

And yet over the howl of this biting wind, I can hear it. Spirit calls unto spirit. Deep calls unto deep. Dust calls unto dust. This land calls to us. We call to this land.

We’re just dust. Just farmers in a community of just farmers. But we are answering a call: this dirt calls our name. Markets crash. Prices plummet far below the cost of production. The sky darkens, ominous and black. But these families cannot go. They will not go. They, we, are meant for this place, this patch of earth, to work, to till, to steward. It is calling our name.

A memory from Sunday flashes. I am standing in our little country church, looking across the congregation, dirt farmers, hog farmers, folks. Raymond Petersen leads us in song, “Victory in Jesus, my Savior forever….” Piet Van Den boogard’s Dutch voice sings clearly beside his wife Anne, their seven boys and three girls singing too. I wonder how they are faring this market storm. I glance over at the Nagels, Maiike holding their new baby, the Fitchs, Randy holding their youngest boy. I think on the Packers, not with us this week, but supporting the new church plant. Each family is part of the pulse of this land, this land gasping for air, for life. But they, in that moment, are part of this sanctuary swelling with song,

“I heard about His healing,
Of His cleansing power revealing.
How He made the lame to walk again
And caused the blind to see;
And then I cried, "Dear Jesus,
Come and heal my broken spirit,"
And somehow Jesus came and brought
To me the victory."

I hum that last line again, my fingers raw red with the cold of this wind. It is time to go inside, fix something for dinner. Hand on the steel cold of the door knob, eyes rest for a moment on the flower next to the door. Peculiarly, it stands in an empty flower bed, cleared and tilled for winter. I lean over to touch its leaves, puzzled. Where did this one come from? Is this one that Hope had planted last spring, after Easter? And are those…. ? I kneel down to really see what I think I am seeing.

Yes, buds about to bloom. Last year’s Easter lily about to bloom in this harsh November howl. I close my eyes, smile, give thanks.

Let the wind blow, the cold sweep down, winter come. I can feel the very heart pulse of the universe. This land, even in an ashen gray November of whipping winds, yields victory in Jesus.


Father God, even in bitter winds resurrection hope blooms. In You, always victory.... at the very heart of the cosmos.

Photo: November hope blooming at back door...at the heart of the universe

Keep Faith and Wait Quietly

Elisabeth Elliot on faithfully doing our work and waiting on God....

"Growth is always imperceptible.

But the farmer exercises long patience in waiting for his crop.

He has done his work... hence he waits quietly.




If we could simply remember that this is true of everything--
that God's purposes are slowly being worked out

for his glory and our good--

we would, like the farmer,

keep faith and wait quietly. "

Lord, keep me from growing weary or meddling with Your plan.

Simply, let me keep the faith and do the work that is mine.
Father, let me exercise long patience, like a farmer. And let me rest.

For You are doing the rest.

(Photos:
~The reaping of the long patience.
~Darryl doing work with a good crop of kids....long patience, harvest still to come
~A snapshot of the little Mennonite neighbor girl draped across her country mailbox, watching the work in our fields and the bringing in of His good purposes. Yes, keeping the faith and waiting quietly...)

Harvest Days

These are harvest days. Beans roll golden. Wagons fill. Children ride with uncles, Grandpa, Dad, and Mama brings meals. We are a family, grateful and blessed to be.

I worked these fields in the spring, with hopes, expectations. We laid seeds into this bed of earth. We tended Mom V.'s bedside. Tender shoots leafed, plants flowered, the promise of pods and yield. Time did its work. Mom Voskamp soared, and we sang through tears. The aphids descended, gnawing late into the night. And now--- yes, already---- comes the harvest, a season of life passed. It's not like last year: these fields thirsted all summer. Thunderheads went north, south. The rain guage grew dusty. Less pods shell through the combine. Storage bins do not run over. We sing anyways.

We are His children, dust from this dust.... and we will trust. We are thankful for what is.... And we remember lessons learned last year, about the only harvest that really matters...

I come to bring meals, to feed men. But it is the men who feed me kernels of truth... about a waiting harvest and the gnashing storm coming down.

Turning the gravel corner onto the 16th line, autumn glory washes the fields. A backdrop of indigo black sky frames flaming trees, combines, and soybeans gilded in sunshine. That backdrop holds rain. Pulling into the fields with meals, warm and satisfying, no faces break into smiles. All eyes face west, towards the horizon.

I run to Darryl with his lunch basket. He shakes his head, hollering over the tractor’s engine, “We’ve got about 30 minutes left and we think its coming fast. Not now. Later.” And he is gone in a cloud of dust.

No time. No time for greetings or food or sleep. Three brothers who have slept less than three hours in the last 48, they keep pressing against clouds on radar screens. They are racing to bring in the harvest until time trickles out and the storm beats down.

Moving back to the van with the meals, the wind turns, gusting cold. The sun that a few moments ago warmed the soil and our skin darkens with the billowing gray, the underbelly of the clouds pressing low. The two mammoth combines surge down the fields, ravenously consuming beans in a scramble against skies.

I see Darryl pointing, thinking he sees streamers of rain on the horizon. The trees are bending now in the rushing fury. Only acres remain…

Droplets, cold and indifferent, now splat the van windshield as I wait here. Machines hurdle across the fields. Augers reach out with the streams of gold. The air is frenetic…. How many more drops before we must stop? How much of the harvest will we have to leave in the field? The world now blurs. The men, exhausted, push the machines faster, through the storm’s slashing and pelting, refusing to surrender.

In the pounding of rain, I wonder... Is this what You meant, Lord, when you asked for harvesters? Focused, relentless, riveted by the shortness of time, prepared to sacrifice comfort, sleep, food? How can I be so oblivious to the storm driving hard on the horizon?

I came to bring meals. And left with haunting realization that too many are starving for Bread.

Lord, make me a harvester. That storm is coming.

"Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field."
Matt. 9:37-38

Originally posted October 2006

(*Photo: Levi coming to join Uncle John V. and Joshua as the pods shell on late summer days)

Listening... and doing

I wake Sunday morning to grey growing on the horizon like dark waves rolling in from the sea. These fields of corn and beans, that lap up around old farmhouses and quiet country churches, lie far from the shore with its seagulls and wet grains of sand, but those clouds to the west, riding in low and full, carry the ocean close, droplets from the depths.

I dress and wait for the sea to come crashing in. I measure oatmeal and pray for a baptism, a revival, of this cracked open land, parched and panting. Outside the kitchen window, bottom leaves of the beans are yellowing. The bean flowers, future pods, have aborted, dropping to the cement-hard soil. Corn leaves have curled all week, writhing under the scorching sun.

The back door opens, and the mudroom sink tap runs. I know he’s in and washing up from the barn. I go to read his face, to ask, wringing my own hands, “Its coming, don’t you think?”

He doesn’t look up. A tsunami might be surging up on that horizon; he is quietly focused on the task at hand. This is how farmers are after years of working dirt and knowing that God is going to do what God is going to do, without anyone’s worry or commentary: its best to simply keep your hand to the plow, doing the part that is yours to do.

He dries his thick knuckles on a towel, eyes looking out the window, then finally offers, “Looks like we may get some, doesn’t it?”

We gather at the porch window to watch that dark sea of hope rise. “They weren’t calling for it, but forecasters can only predict. God alone performs.”

He glances up at the clock over the kitchen table. “If we didn’t have worship service, we could sit on the porch swing and watch.”

We fill bowls and tie bibs and keep our eyes on the sky, the waters above separated from the dry land below.

The odd drop smudges the dining room windows as we bow to thank Him for this day and food. Funny, how all eight of us take spoon to mouth but wordlessly keep our eyes on the heights whence our help comes from.

We are slipping shoes on and patting down the last rooster tails in front of the back mirror, when we hear it. We still and listen to the steady patter on the roof. Darryl breaks into a smile and I can’t help laughing. “Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

The garage door opens to wet diamonds falling and silver puddles pooling. A curtain of watery green beads veils the grain elevators across the fields. The windshield wipers sing. I shake my head in the wonder of this gentle deluge.

“Our entire livelihood waits for the sea to roll in and rain down like this. We’re so full of our dreams and work, and yet we are so utterly impotent. We are so…at His mercy.” The last three words are whispered, a bowing low.

The rain is falling heavy on the country church roof by the time we take our seats in the sanctuary. As the pastor steps to the pulpit, a few farm families trickle in, late from chores. To the rhythm of the sea sprinkling down, he begins, “If you’ll take our Bibles, we’ll turn to our ongoing series in 1 Kings. We concluded chapter 17 last week, so we’ll pick up at chapter 18, at the very first verse.”

Thumbs page and gilded leaves turn. The pastor clears his voice, and commences, “After many days the word of the Lord came to Elijah, in the third year, saying, “Go, show yourself to Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.”

The only sound filling the sanctuary is the celestial seas pouring out, the earth’s soil opening wide and swallowing deeply.

Rising out of the waves, the size of a man’s fist, the ocean, now, before us, has gathered together and rolled out across our wilting, waiting, gulping fields. He, on a Sunday in July, has sent rain upon the earth.

He speaks across time. We hear. And tremble as His breath, warm with vapor and life, falls upon us.

Gazing out the sanctuary windows at the world of rain, we listen to the roof softly sing of the sea, and we fill with unspeakable, inexpressible praise.

It’s doing the part that the impotent do.

Saturday at the Farm: Stay the Course

Lean into it, girl.

That's it.

Turn her hard.

She'll build your muscles, this old girl still going strong.

Steering takes focus. And strength to keep that wheel straight on the row.

Don't turn to the left or the right.

Keep your eyes fixed on where you are going.

There's a crop He's counting on you to harvest.

Stay the course.

*Photo: Hope on a Farmall M my Dad restored

Always

They say that on still summer nights in these parts, if you lay in bed just so, ear cocked and listening, you can hear the soybeans growing out in the milky moonlight. Under the stars, seas of green surge around island farmhouses, waves rolling across this countryside, growing, stretching, reaching.

The other night as I lay there, an expanse of window my celestial headboard, I tilt my head the way farmwives do, and listen to the fields. And in the night quiet, I am sure I hear it: the piercing stabs of countless billions of stylets, sucking the life sap out of our ocean of green. The aphids have descended.

Monophagus, this species of aphid, aphis glycines, has an appetite for only one plant on the planet: soybeans. We have served up hundreds of acres for their ravenous, exclusive palate.

For the first time ever, these miniscule, pear-shaped insects in the hemiptera order were noted in the Midwest already in the early days of May. Usually the swimming holes have warmed from days, weeks, months of sun’s heat before the aphids take their long distance arch across the heavens to our feasting grounds here in the Great Lakes region of the spinning blue marble. This premature swarming is unheard of. But ear close to the window pane, I can almost hear it: hundreds upon hundreds clinging like lice to each and every single stalk, piercing, sucking, secreting sugary waste from the two cornicles projecting from their abdomens. The waste left from the sap of our crop, our lifeblood. I feel weak, laying there awake, listening.

Come the fiery rim of light on the eastern horizon, I rise and walk the fields’ edge, bending over to lift backside of leaves. I peer close: the pale green sprinkling on each leaf now has a few membranous wings. Hope flutters. Will they fly away?

The wind, searing and close, picks up, turning up the silvery underskirts of the maple leaves. The black underbelly of the pregnant clouds seem to scrape the trio of elevator legs of Boyd’s Grain Storage to the west as she blows in, low and heavy. Darryl steps out on to the porch. He’s come in from the barn to watch. I move from the field towards the porch, eyes and hope fixed on that horizon. Children spill out too, knowing. It is what farming families do: porch prayers, the impotent before the Omnipotent. Gallons upon gallons of water poured down from the heavens would wash each of those 2.2 million stalks clean of the voracious aphids. If the drops fall on our fields.

We bow our heads. All that fills our ears is the sound of the wind rushing through, tugging those lumbering clouds behind. It sweeps our pleas up to the heights. Darryl reaches across the porch swing to squeeze my hand. Yes, I know. He is good, regardless.

We can see the gray streams of rescue falling near the grain elevators. Less than a mile more now, a few more fields. The air hangs, electrified. A few splats of wet on the front walk’s cobblestone sends the children racing onto the lawn laughing, hands over heads, ready to praise and catch the drops of our deliverance.

And then the wind and the water hails down upon us. I push up against Darryl’s side of the swing, hair and face misty wet. His face is turned towards the field, watching the rain drumming against those leaves. Then, as quickly as she rushed in, she departs to the east. As the patter fades away, we are still, Darryl and I hanging on this swing. I turn to read his eyes, to read what I already know: it is not enough.

His rough fingers gently squeeze mine again, and, in the hollow pit of my stomach, I remember: He is always enough. I step back into the kitchen to put a pot of breakfast porridge on the stove. He will restore the hope that the locusts—or aphids—eat up.

In the morning light, if I wait and listen, I hear it too: the steady beat of a heart that trusts.

Led by GPS

Heading north down the field I had vision, that endless blue sky stretching out like a royal canopy under which we could ride to where earth meets the heavens. But at the northern headland, I’d throttle back on that 175 horsepower tractor, pull the hydraulic lever up to raise those 30 feet of steel teeth digging deep behind me, wind that steering wheel hard to the right, throttle up, drop those teeth down again and head south down the field. Driving blind.

Those gusts of wind from the northern regions of this spinning planet, those winds upon which His chariot rides, caught me up in a swirl of blinding, choking dust. The murky roiling fog of earth particles obscured the mark of my last pass down the field, earth turned up, exposed and warm. With no guide, where to drive? Pull five feet more to the right? Three feet to the left? I couldn’t be leaving gaps of unworked earth, a crusty, impenetrable seed bed. Nor could I be overlapping, wasting time, tractor hours, and fuel working soil that was already laid open for seeds. But here I was driving 12th gear, full throttle, ripping up the earth’s crust, all the while like someone had thrown a red bandana over my eyes leaving me to grope and weave uneasily down the field.

I gave up squinting out the windows. I’d drive blind. I’d head down the field led only by the global positioning system, signals from on high. The screen in front of me blazed a triplet of green lights if I was online, the exact angle headed south. A red light to the right indicated I needed to steer further to the right, a red light to the left, veer left. The screen alerted down to the inches of being on or off course.

This dust cloud rolled down the field by faith. I’d relinquished control, released the wheel from being guided by my sight, what I could personally see, sense, determine. Engine working hard, this machine bore down on the earth, guided only by signals from the heavens, these hands responding by adjusting the steering wheel.

Come the still of the evening, a small corner of the field had to be worked up on its own, due to a fixing of some tile drainage. Instead of setting the GPS for the few acres, I cultivated by sight, dropping the cultivator teeth in close to my last swath, fixing my eyes on that piece of earth where worked ground met that tooth. At field end, I glanced back at my work. Crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Why drive by sight when following skyward signals kept me on the straight and narrow?

Oh, Heart, let go. Let go of steering this life, these days, by sight. Parent this way? Invest time that way? More here? Less there? Where am I going? Forsake groping. Release and let go. Drive by faith.

Turn on the GPS, God’s Prayer System. He knows exactly where on this spinning globe you are.

And if you quiet life, let go, and purpose to live by faith, you’ll experience His GPS:

“And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying,

This is the way, walk in it,”

when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.”

~lsaiah 30:21

Lord, the dust of my days makes me lose my way. And even when I think I can see, I can't get it, my life, all straight. Take over, Lord. Guide me. I am turning on the GPS: God's Prayer System. Lead on.

A Mama who used GPS in her home, listening Him to lead

Broken

Back to the fields today, cultivating while Darryl plants...notes scratched in the tall ditch grass Friday...

We broke up the earth, tearing her asunder, steel ripping deep, and she wept not.

Then the hydraulic hose on the teeth ripping machine blew apart, again.

When the men came up that long lane, dirt-crusted and splattered with oil, Mama, baking cookies, dropped the spoon in the batter, and gathered up grandbabies under her watch to take that oil dripping hose down the backroads over to McGavin’s for a new hose, certain to inform them that they hadn’t crimped it right after it blew apart last night and it was, again, costing us downtime.
Later, sun further over in that blue sky, Mama drove up to field’s edge with fixed part, children drooping in drowsy slumber about her. Men snapped in repaired hose, and dropped those teeth again into soil, rending earth’s crust, all of which somehow draws this broken family back together again.

Repaired.

Lord, let this working together work towards fixing us.

Genesis 3:17-19

"...getting food from the ground

Will be as painful as having babies is for your wife;

you'll be working in pain all your life long.

The ground will sprout thorns and weeds,

you'll get your food the hard way,

Planting and tilling and harvesting,

sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk,

Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried;

you started out as dirt, you'll end up dirt."

Sabbath Rest

We did not work in the fields yesterday, though the sun shone bright and the earth warmed, ready. We rested in Him. And let the seeds lie still.

Sietze Buning's poem, “Obedience” :

Were my parents right or wrong
not to mow the ripe oats that Sunday morning
with the rainstorm threatening?

I reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man
and of the ox fallen into the pit.
Without an oats crop, I argued,
the cattle would need to survive on town-bought oats
and then it wouldn’t pay to keep them.
Isn’t selling cattle at a loss like an ox in a pit?

My parents did not argue.
We went to church.
We sang the usual psalms louder than usual--
we, and the other whose harvests were at stake:

“Jerusalem, where blessing waits,
Our feet are standing in thy gates.”

“God, be merciful to me:
On thy grace I rest my plea.”

Dominie’s spur-of-the-moment concession:
“He rides on the clouds, the wings of the storm;
The lightning and wind his missions perform.”

Dominie made no concessions on sermon length:
“Five Good Reasons for Infant Baptism,”
though we heard little of it,

for more floods came and more winds blew and beat
upon that House than we had figured on, even,
more lightning and thunder
and hail the size of pullet eggs.
Falling branches snapped the electric wires.
We sang the closing psalm without the organ and in the dark:

“Ye seed from Abraham descended,
God’s covenant love is never ended.”

Afterward we rode by our oats field,
flattened.

“We still will mow it,” Dad said.
“Ten bushels to the acre, maybe, what would have been fifty
if I had mowed right after milking
and if the whole family had shocked.
We could have had it weatherproof before the storm.”

Later at dinner Dad said,
“God was testing us. I’m glad we went.”
“Those psalms never gave me such a lft as t his morning.”
Mother said, “I wouldn’t have missed it.”
And even I thought but did not say,
How guilty we would feel now if we had saved the harvest.

~Sietze Buning

Dirt in the Blood

A few scratches while kids eat breakfast and before I head out to the tractor again to cultivate the home farm. Told the children last night on the way home from the fields that once you get dirt in your blood, you can never get it out: the farm becomes part of you. From my inbox:

"I suppose the greatest tears flowed [after reading yesterday's post] when I remembered my husband's grandfather who was always so dear to us both, still driving tractor at 84 years.

Oh, spring does something to my heart and blood. It makes me reflective and emotional, but also so very filled with hope. Hope because I can count on the faithfulness of Him who sends the Spring, year after year. "

Yes, dear friend, spring does something in my heart and blood too, this spring full of dust and dirt and hope. For we are all just dust headed home to Him: (from the archives)

"Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
dust thou art, to dust returnest,
was not spoken of the soul." ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

She said it just before the lightning forked across the western sky. One hand on the steering wheel, I had turned and caught the tilt of her head and tone of her words, just as the sheet of white flashed behind the arching bolt framed by the passenger window.

Perhaps it was the tingling aura of power charging the air, but I tend to think it was more the weight of what she said next that seared her words into my mind.

“After combining the wheat all afternoon with Dad in the fields, we’ll need to go home for baths, won’t we?” Hope brushed her tangled hair out of her face. She looked around at her tired, grimy brothers. “We are all like… dust.” And then the lightning tore up the blackening sky.

I couldn’t speak. A nod would have to suffice. My fingers, but shaped dust, fumbled to slip through Hope’s dirty ones. I squeezed tight. Heavy raindrops pelted against the windshield.
We drove home from the harvest fields, dust in a rainstorm.

And in that moment I knew who I was: just dust, headed Home.

Lord, this body came from it, and there will return. I am a flower fading, a leaf blown away, dust returning. My time on this dirt is short….and then the earth opens up and my body lies deep. But I, I am coming home to You. Let this body of dust breathe, live, love, laugh well... until then.

Family

Yesterday was a milestone day. From my tractor seat, I looked out across the field. Three tractors moved together across the northeast corner: my husband and our two eldest sons, a few days shy of 12 and 10. While I cultivated in long sweeping swaths with the International Maxxum and the 30 foot wide cultivator, our third son beside me, the older boys and their Dad, driving a Ford, International, and a John Deere, raked, picked and hauled stones off that front 40 acres.

Was it almost a dozen years ago that I delivered meals to the men working in this very field, the car seat strapping in a six day old baby? Now, 12 Mays later, those little clenched hands have grown into the lanky arms of the young boy driving the 1466 tractor down this dirt. His younger brother whom I carried in a pack on my back, big blue eyes peering over my shoulder, while picking rocks off this field, nows drives the tractor ahead of him. Time has given us near men.

My Dad and the boys' Dad built that 2,000 head hog barn on this farm those 12 Mays ago, when Caleb was mere weeks old. My grandfather came to inspect those trusses, plumb those walls. Each spring when the tractors roll into these fields, I miss my Grandpa Morton, his faded jeans and even more faded hat, a farmer who planted seed 70 Mays in his 80 years. Now the boys’ grandfather, Grandpa Voskamp, is missing from the spring line-up of old hands at tractor wheels; his first priority in these days of tenderly budding woods and croaking frogs is to lovingly sit with fading Grandma Voskamp. I have taken his post. Time has faded and changed the faces of those who work this dirt.

The sun lowered in the west, pulling down a curtain a soft mauves edged in rose. My sister, who as a teen with big hair and bigger glasses brought meals to my grandfather in this field, fed theday’s crew steaming lasagne and crusty bread out of the oven, her three little girls tagging behind with a few of ours. Gulping down spoonfuls at field’s edge, Darryl tells me that they will keep picking stones until dark, and then he will spell me off on the cultivator, if I can go till the stars come out.

Just before nine, my brother’s diesel pickup pulls up on the gravel sideroad. Could he take over for me?

Five-year-old Levi and I, dirty and weary, crawl out of the tractor and into the shallows of night. My brother heads down the field in a cloud of dust.

“Come on, Levi, let’s head home to bed.”

His slender fingers lace through mine as we walk across the headlands to the truck.

“Mama? Someday I’m going to drive that tractor for you. But we’ll still need you too.”

I smile. This land, oblivious to time’s march, will always need family. By His grace, we, with different names and faces, will be here, dwelling in His land.

Psalm 37:3 Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.

Lord, we are dwelling in this land You've given. Make us a faithful family, trusting You, Who grows all things out of the dust of the ground. Like families.

From the Archives:
Faithful Farmer
Law of the Farm
Harvest Storm

Spotted, at just past one

It was just before lunch, today. I think the clock on the stove read a few minutes after one. I was serving up the broiled sandwiches, Darryl ladling the soup. I could hardly hear Darryl talking about barn happenings over the din.

Darryl turned to Malakai, sitting on the window seat's edge by the table, driving his spoon in high, loud gear, like a tractor over his waiting bowl, "Hey KAI! Can you tune it down a tad?"

Kai flashed his dazzling smile, "Sure!"... and resumed a quiet brrrrrring. Over top of Hope's piano practice and Caleb and Joshua's boisterous joking, I strained to hear Darryl's quiet voice tell me about the health status of the young gilt struggling through birthing. Before I could respond to the birthing plight, Levi wanted to know if I had time, after I served the sandwiches, to play a round of Uno?

And that's when Kai bellowed it.

"QUIET EVERYBODY!"

I tried hard to stifle a guffaw. Darryl smirked and rolled his eyes--yes, quiet!

"See over there! I see two robins!!"

The house stilled. Robins?

The kids had been sledding down the hills of slippery white yesterday afternoon out across the fields. The neighbors had whizzed by, a blur of speed, on their snowmobiles.

Only scampering feet could be heard as everyone crushed in around the dining room windows. Silence as we scanned the backyard.

And there, on the only island of green in a icy sea of winter, spring--a duet of spring-- bobbed. The yellow-legged duo were dancing spring's number right behind the large trunk of the spruce tree. The tribe broke out into hooting and hollering. Darryl and I locked eyes and mouthed in amazement: "Spring?!"

As the children washed hands and bustled round the table for lunch, all a talk of where the hargingers would roost come the cold forecasted for the end of the week, and if robins were into frozen food because what else could worms be this early in a Canadian March, and had someone just actually told them about the early daylight savings time this year but maybe they should get a return ticket south... all I could think of "As long as the earth remains, there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night." (Gen. 8:22) So it has been happening since the very beginning: a day just like today, when the robins were spotted.

You never fail, Father; just as You have planned it, it has come to pass. And will come to pass.

Sometimes it is loud and we almost miss it. Sometimes it is unexpected and we are surprised. Sometimes we have doubts and hardly believe it. But regardless of us and the swirl of it all... You are faithfully, quietly, at work all around us.

And we caught a glimpse of Your handiwork today, a few minutes just past one.

Lord, You never stop working around us. Even when we aren't looking for it. But maybe if we still... wait... hush... we'll spot You at work more often.