“You crown the year with your
bounty,
and your carts overflow with abundance.”
Psalm 65:10
If I’m near water, I eat
fish. Lobster in New England, crab cakes
in Seattle , smoked salmon on Lake Michigan,
grouper in Florida . In northern Minnesota , nothing tastes better than walleye
right from the lake. Well, maybe nothing
but perch.
Out East, I’m sure, one can get a
really good leg of lamb; but if you want it done right, you may have to visit
Australia or South Africa or New Mexico, where sheep are taken seriously.
But if you’re on the hunt for a
pork chop or a chunk of filet mignon that melts in your mouth, then visit my
corner of the world. I live in a red meat country whose bounty will take second
place to nobody’s Angus. Our cattle are corn-fed, not half-starved in mesquite
groves or pastured out so the meat is grizzled as leather chaps. We pamper our
beef here in Siouxland, and our hogs grow up in confinements so climate-controlled
the residents never see a cloud. My old friends in southern Wisconsin call
their prime Swiss cheese Green County Gold; well, our stock in trade is glorious
red marble.
But it’s just about all we do,
agriculturally. Sure, there are a few dairies around, but mile after endless
mile of farmland where I live is perfectly lined with just two crops, corn and
beans. And all that bounty—and tons of grain are produced here annually—all of
that bounty goes to livestock, to cattle and hogs, to the red meat on your
Hardee’s sandwich and the sirloin you buy anywhere in America and even around
the world.
I should be proud—and part of me
is. But our bounty, and our success, is more and more attributable to just a
few good men and women. With every passing year,
farming—agriculture—agribusiness—is less and less a family affair, as fewer and
fewer landowners work more and more ground. The distance between producer and
customer has lengthened exponentially since the days of what was—a century
ago—subsistence farming. What that means in terms of Psalm 65 is that fewer and
fewer of us, even here in the heartland, really rejoice at the climactic
phenomena David finds so blessed.
Right now, all that good ground is
mantled in new snow. But if I drive a couple blocks south, a massive pile of
corn and/or soybeans still sits on the ground like so much waste. It isn’t, of course; it’s surplus. The bounty
this fall was immense, probably too much, torpedoing prices. Some folks drive
by that huge pile and admire the abundance. Many don’t because out here
sometimes too much is, in fact, too much.
A good friend of mine told me once
that people who don’t put seed in the ground in don’t know God. That strikes me
as a hair judgmental, but I know what he means, even though I’ve never lived on
a farm. What I’m saying is that I’m guessing there are fewer and fewer, even
here, who delight in David’s immense joy.
The real blessing of Psalm 65,
whether you work the land or a Dell computer like the one in front of me, is
the inspiration one receives from David’s attribution of his overflowing joy to
God’s abundant blessing, the reminder his bliss that our blessings—all of
them-- come from the God who made the heavens and the earth around us, around all of us.
It’s not something I think of when
some waitress slaps a half-rack of ribs in front of me on a Friday night. It’s
not something I think about in late March snow or even April showers. That kind
of attribution, like faith itself, is not something my human nature conjures on
it own.
One of the blessings of Psalm 65
is the reminder that not a dime’s worth of our immense abundance comes our way
without the showers of God’s eternal goodness, his love.
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