Beautiful crops
Icome from a long line of the kind of men that know the secrets of the dirt; folks that woke up tired from yesterday and went to bed tired still. They were blue collar before it was trendy and had a red neck before people made bumper stickers about it.
They weigh on my mind a lot, my ancestors that brought life and sustenance out of the ground. I feel guilty sometimes driving my four door truck from my suburban neighborhood to my grocery store job. I look at my relatively soft hands and ask myself what it is that I’m making of this life. I com-plain about being “wo’ out” because I cleaned some dishes and mowed the postage stamp of a yard we have.
I can almost hear Grandpa laughing as I think about the thirty acres of land he farmed for years.
It’s easy to go through the motions and think nothing we do will have amounted to anything as important as what those farmers all across this country do every day.
But recently I heard a brilliant man named Allen Levi say, “The crop I’m responsible for is beauty”, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. I may not break my back picking cotton or have my hands stained from tobacco stalks, but I can plant a seed of something and steward that until it’s something beautiful.
When I feel like my work is meaningless, I can remember that there’s a beauty in providing groceries for my community. I can know that there is life in the way I treat my wife and children. Each week I stare at a blank screen, and like a seed bursting out of the turned ground, words appear out of nowhere.
From time to time I sit on the porch and pick a guitar, and even if it’s just me and the birds that hear it, I can choose to enjoy the harvest that is twenty years of having a piece of wood and steel resting on my lap.
And whatever you do that’s beautiful, you can reap the harvest too. And sleep well knowing you did something important today.
