Sunday Morning Meds--Abundance

“You crown the year with your bounty, 

and your carts overflow with abundance.” Psalm 65

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 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. There are some 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 quarter-pounder 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.

Across the region this year, way too much water this spring kept farmers out of now barren fields that would be otherwise ripening with corn. But just outside my window, corn that got a very late start is finally shoulder high, big and bright green. I'm guessing, in a couple of months, a couple blocks south of here the elevator will host endless boxcars waiting to haul that which isn’t fed here down the tracks to markets near and far. Even this wet, wet year, here there’ll surplus.

A friend of mine told me once that people who don’t put seed in the ground in don’t know God. That may be a hair judgmental, but I know what he means, even though I’ve never lived on a farm. Once upon a time, it's hard not to think that there were millions more farmers and gardeners than there are today. Even in “the Tall Corn State” it’s hard not to believe that fewer and fewer people delight in David’s particular species of joy: “You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance.”

David's is a harvest song, and right now we're not there yet. But the blessing of Psalm 65, whether you work the land or work a desktop Dell like the one in front of me, is the inspiration one receives from David’s attribution of joy to God’s abundant blessing, the reminder his blessings—all of them-- come from the God who made the heavens and the earth around us, around all of us. 

Just one from Psalm 65 is the reminder that not a dime’s worth of our immense abundance, our joy, comes our way without the showers of God’s eternal goodness, God’s never-ending love.