Sunday Morning Meds--the work of our hands

“…establish the work of our hands for us—

yes, establish the work of our hands.”  Psalm 90

The bike path east of town cuts diagonally through tall fields of corn that sometimes buffer prairie winds and sometimes channel it. In July, when the temperature is 100 degrees, that narrow corridor is a wind tunnel. Back when I used it daily, I fought prairie winds all the way down, then sailed along on a song when I came back to town.

Dry corn is noisy. Its leaves stiffen and curl up, and crack up against each when the wind bullies 'em. I’ve never been a farmer, but I’ve lived beside 12-foot corn most of my life, and I know when to get worried about drought. Back then, we hadn’t had rain for far too long. I stopped mowing our lawn when the turf was toast. From a distance that section of corn along the bike path still looked green, but up close the leaves were smacking and cracking.

The man who planted that tall corn along the bike path died that summer. My wife told me about his death weeks after it occurred. I’d missed the obituary. Had I known, I would have gone to the funeral. Once, years ago, that man told me I ought to write a book about his life. I should have.

Cantankerous and quarrelsome, his life deserved a story. We’ll call him LeRoy and protect his memory, not because he was ever an innocent. His wife left him after a couple decades of what must have been horror. For a time, fistfights with his son were public spectacles. Once, a neighbor’s sow wandered on to his yard, and he shot it dead, then called the neighbor to pick it up. That afternoon, the neighbor called the radio station to nominate LeRoy for “Good Neighbor of the Day.” The whole town laughed.

For a time, LeRoy went to the same church we did. A friend of mine told a Lutheran friend, that our church would pay for their building project if the Lutherans would take LeRoy off our hands.

"Let me think about that," the guy said. And then, "Naaaah."

There’s lots more. Some considered him a crackpot. Worse.

Later in his life, he mellowed, thank the Lord. I’m sure there were moments when he wished he hadn’t been what he was.

The day I heard that Leroy died I took that bike path east of town in withering heat and felt his absence because it bothered me, strangely enough, that there was no one around to worry about his dry, cracking corn. He would have, but he couldn’t, and he wasn’t.

I felt somehow responsible, if that makes sense. LeRoy always liked me; I’m not sure why. He didn’t like a lot of people, and he wasn’t shy about his preferences. When I rode my bike through that tunnel of his tall corn and heard its leaves cracking, I ought to worry for him.

As all of us do worry—about a bunch of things. Most of us have reasons, our own fields of too dry corn. 

Like Moses, and maybe even LeRoy, I pray that God almighty will establish the works of my hands—establish these very words I’m typing. Don’t let ‘em become dry bones in the hot sun. Keep ‘em growing and keep ‘em green, even in the heat. Make ‘em better than they are.

I'm still here, but on a day like today, my 71st birthday, "the work of my hands" seems largely past tense. 

Moses’s agonizing concern arises from a heart estranged, a thirsty soul languishing in the eerie darkness of an eclipse, God somehow hidden. Moses is asking that what he does with his hands in that wilderness where his people are serving a sentence, what he does from day-to-day, his work, his toil, his care—that all of that is blessed. That’s all he wants, as do most of us. Bless it, Lord.

What he wants is that kind of blessing, that his good corn somehow feeds a hungry world.