Assignment

It's a beautiful day here. Hot, but beautiful. I've been eagerly anticipating (and noting to Missy how eagerly I have been anticipating) the coming of Spring. We've lived here on The Farm before during all three other seasons - but never Spring. Not such a big deal to Missy since she grew up here and has experienced many a beautiful Spring day here.

Yesterday was sunny and hot, too. And the trees have just exploded today. Driving home from work I was amazed by the traces of green covering the the giant trees to the west.

My dad recently gave me an assignment. He would like me to articulate my calling - our calling - here. With so many changes over the past year - and changes that we felt were a result of some sort of calling - what exactly (or, maybe not exactly) is it that we are here to do? What is it that we are about? How do we (and what we do) fit into the larger purposes of God and His Kingdom? How is the Gospel articulated in our home, our hands, our words, our desires?

Perhaps the next series of posts will be efforts towards answering those questions (and let it be said that this exercise is mostly for our own good and clarifying purposes).

First, a section from a book I've been reading. At Nature's Pace by Gene Logsdon. In the introduction he writes (and this is lengthy - I want to archive it here):

But my hope, my intention, is that this book exudes less anger or blame for the condition of rural society than it inspires love for the land and the value of rural life. If that love prevails, it will lead more people back to the farm. And what America needs again so desperately is a solid middle-class society of independent smallholders.

I do not farm on a large scale, nor do I farm for the money - though I do make a little. I farm for the enjoyment and to experiment with various methods which I hope will lead me to discover better ways of farming. I work to prepare the way for new farmers who must be found to take over the land when the megafarms disintegrate, as most of them will. I know of no other calling that could challenge me more, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

The joys of rural life, though they bear little resemblance to the overblown descriptions of Rosseauist romantics, are still very much realizable, a very real antidote to the restlessness and chaos that infect modern life. But rural life is a victim of the most inaccurate media-imaging in our cultural history - as bad as the imaging of the Native American. Too often, rural life is presented to an urban audience, already prejudiced against "local yokels," as a place of discontent, boredom, poverty, crudeness, despair, meanness, ignorance. Surely, these tendencies exist in the cross section of any community. And yet I know that just as there have always been people in farming who were unhappy because they were not fit for it, so there are thousands, perhaps millions of people in urban situations who are unhappy because they belong in farming and do not know it. They have the true farmer's spirit in them - that blend of creative artistry, independence, manual skill, and love of nurturing that marks the true farmer. If some of these people had been exposed to intelligent and craftsmanlike farming, perhaps they might be living on and working their own little farms. And with these hundreds of thousands of carefully kept little garden farms dotting the landscape, all of society would profit.

I hope readers of these essays share the vision I had as I wrote them: that sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward the earth's destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and arts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose return to the public mind."

I think there might be some interesting implications to the thoughtful Christ-follower here. If the Gospel is much more than a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ" but is, in fact, Good News for all of Creation and if we are called to live now as the displaced citizens of that future country (Phil. 3:20) then our homes, our farms, our families, our churches ought to be places firmly rooted in the stuff of the here and now but that point to the future coming of our Savior who will then bring everything under his beneficent and life-giving control (Phil 3:20-21).