One week into the summer, I have dirt-stained hands and a sun-baked nose. Each morning my car flies over the backroads snaking through the low mountains I grew up on until I reach the valley. From down in the strawberry field, the world is diminished into a circle of farm land fenced in by the same mountains, all of which are encompassed by a bright blue bowl of sky. The early summer sun smiles down from on high and my heart sings.
Work on a farm isn’t easy. By noon, the odd breaks in my skin ooze blood as I wash my hands for lunch, but within an hour I won’t be able to see the blood for the dirt caking around the wounds. It is work, though. The labor is honest with visible results; my sense of accomplishment is just as real as the sweat beading down my back. For the first time in my life, a hard day’s work is just that. Nothing more, nothing less.
As the summer goes on, I’m sure I will lose my rose-colored glasses and there will be days that I complain about my worn muscles and dust-filled eyes. Today, however, learning how to help living things grow, discovering new ways to be a good steward of the land God has entrusted to us, and...I could go on line after line, gushing unintelligibly about my love for my God and all the good things He has made.
This wouldn’t be a true post by yours truly without a little lesson from the week. Yesterday morning found me in the blueberry field, clipping away at invasive saplings and grapevines. I worked my way down the row of bushes until I came to a cluster completely overwhelmed by dried morning glory, young vines, and even ivy. The blueberries were almost wholly choked out, but as I began to slowly free the bushes from the bramble, I also began to understand something I think might be almost profound.
If I were to grab a fistful of the antagonizing plants and pull them out, I would kill the very plant I’m trying to save. The detangling process takes time and care and effort and I remembered the parable of the good seed choked out by weeds. Never before have I understood how truly overpowering invasive plants can be. The anxieties and woes of this world are like that. God freely gives each of His children a blueberry bush of purposeful joy, of eternal perspective, of desire for His glory. And yet, we have other seeds in the soil of our lives that seek to leech off the good plant, to climb over it to reach better light and support. We can’t help those seeds being there, but if we are poor caretakers, the blueberries will swiftly be overgrown, unrecognizable for the plants we failed to nip in the bud.
It’s the beginning of a thought that might, in fact, be beyond basic, but it is also profound. At least, it is profound to me.
