Thursday, February 09, 2006
Logos Dei: Winter Wheat
Another cloud of burning dust rolls voraciously across land so seared it makes Sherman's march through Georgia look like a Sierra Club outing. Weapons of mass desctuction are toys compared to what can be turned inside, directed against a hated soul.
Kansas in January: furrows under a cold sun. Arctic air, frozen ground. A few inches underneath, the promise of what the farmers put there in the fall. You plant and you hope.
God does the planting. As an experiment I took the seed. When it started to grow I unleashed the attack. His Word, delicate, green, living amid the soul-wide destruction, improbably stayed. Winter fell and also stayed.
Center-seeking self-preservation admits of no need for new greenery. Any change is defined as a bad thing as it upsets a careful stability. Yet the seed is there, the new plant, and no hellish farm implement, no well-planned and sustained plan of destruction will touch it. It's as if the bulldozers all hit glass walls. God's Word will not be touched. Eventually, even maintaining winter costs too much. Years pile up in fatigued windrows, movement becomes slow and pained. God does not quit.
No effort of man can stop Earth's progress around the sun. Spring will come, the land warms, the ice reluctantly lets go. Some delicate timer says "Now!" and last fall's wheat begins to grow again. If everything goes reasonably well, in late July there will be bright yellow wheat to harvest. Even if things aren't reasonable, if drought blows in on eternal hot winds, if constant rain lashes the land, something will grow. Perhaps not perfectly, but the seed will not be completely denied.
God invented gardening. He will make it grow. Anyone who stands in the way pays the price in agonized life. Spring will not be denied. The pleasure of the new growth can be denied, I can stick my head into the hard dry ground and ignore the signs of growth and its pain, but the growth will happen. God doesn't give up.
