Revelation

"Some of them just got too big for their britches." 

People said that occasionally, that some farmers who went down during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, went in too big too fast and got blown off the land by a disaster in the markets. Didn't matter what you were up to either--cattle, hogs, corn or soybeans, all of them fell off a cliff and took a thousand farmers with them. Most of those went down on the coattails of good, strong advice from bankers who were more than willing to hand out cheap money as long as the markets were strong and land prices up there waaaay high. When all of tanked, it became impossible for lots of operators to watch the sun rise.

Lots of them were looking for nothing more than having enough of an operation to pass along to their sons. They got big because they wanted the best for the family. But it didn't matter how right and noble and thoughtful their motives were; whole operations were mortgaged on land whose value dropped off the table, and hit the floor. People went down. It wasn't pleasant.

Then again, there were other farmers too, small-time operations who'd basically got the same work done in the very same way for decades, farmers who didn't grow, didn't prosper, didn't get too big for their britches, because they'd never really wanted all that much out of the operation in the first place. You know?--if there's good fishing to be done out there on the Missouri, well, maybe I can wait a week to get the corn in.

Some of those--many of those--went down too.

The family we were visiting that night were, basically, one of those. They were losing their farm, but people in the know--old-timers in the region and some of the elders in the consistory--were saying in very hushed tones that Benny never had been much of a farmer, not even in good times.

His wife was a queen though, did far too much the milking herself when the old man wasn't around, far too much of the farm work, period. All very hush-hush. Nobody was gleeful Benny was losing his farm, and no one in the church council on which I served back then did much but shake their heads. 

We were out there at Benny's farm that night, two of us, as directed by the council to offer, well, support. The church wasn't going to bale him out, couldn't really. Besides, in Benny's case, you couldn't just blame the dang bank. The Farm Crisis took out good people, hard workers, dedicated farmers. But it took out Bennys too, men who, you know, got by, you might say, during the fat years.

I wish I could remember the house, but I can't. Because I don't, I assume you need simply to see it was an old farmhouse with pint-sized rooms and walls that were beginning to wander a bit out of plumb. Kitchen floor creaks some. Fridge full of Christmas cards. Fluorescents over the table where we sat. 

I was a kid. The office of elder implies age, doesn't it?--an "elder" should be one. I wasn't. What did I know? Not much. Two of us were sent by the consistory we were part of to be a presence, to pray with them in their hour of need. This was the way church worked.

"And then they tell me I shouldn't drink the water--nitrates, you know?" Benny growled, a small, bald man in a collared shirt I suppose he'd worn special because the elders were coming. "'You get it checked?' one of those DNR guys asks me. I told him I'd just learned to live with a gut ache."

I didn't feel like an elder. I didn't understand what people meant by "the farm crisis," didn't really know if we were in it or not. It was like a pandemic in a way: if you didn't have the virus, some instinct to live made you wonder whether truly anyone did. I didn't know the people either. I didn't grow up in the church I was serving.

In one of the stretches of silence that night, Bennie's wife leaned back and picked a book off a stack of things beside the phone, put it down on the kitchen table between us. "I'm loving this, Jim," she said, or something similar, and she pointed at a book of devotions I'd written for children. "And the kids like it too. Been a blessing."

I'd been asked to write devotions for kids, nothing I'd ever planned, nothing I'd ever dreamed of doing. I had no aspirations for preaching. I wasn't fulfilling some calling I'd been preparing to accomplish for years. It was a job. I got asked. I liked it, loved it, in fact; but it wasn't a calling. Art!--now that was a calling. 

All of that was forty years ago, mid-'80s. Not long ago on the obituary page of the local paper, I saw her picture, read her name. Truth be told, she wasn't all that much older than I am. The obituary didn't say how she'd died, but leaving that farm, I'm sure, didn't somehow bring about the end of what some people might have called a hard life. Then again, maybe not. There was, after all, all that fishing.

When I saw her picture, I recognized her and remembered her telling me that some things I wrote in a book of meds for kids brought her joy, maybe even a little peace, just a few words I typed up out of our basement had become some kind of shelter in the time of storm.

To be told that, that night, was somehow shocking and still is. When I saw her picture, I remembered. That night, I got worked over--I got used somehow in that woman's life in a way that was, when we walked into that kitchen, totally unforeseen. Long before I had been an elder, I was one, I suppose, installed into office and put to work by none other than the hand of Almighty. It seemed to me, that night, that I'd had nothing to do with it at all.

My McDonalds senior coffee means I'm elderly today, but no longer an elder. Still, I can't help thinking that there were moments around that table that may well have been among the best things I'd ever done or will do, and I had no clue.

Not long ago, here I sat on our couch, the obituaries open in front of me. Strangely enough, I couldn't help smiling. 

I hope that's okay.