Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“. . .they are like the new grass of the morning—

though in the morning it springs up new, 

by evening it is dry and withered.”

“This is a harsh world,” she told me when I sat down for coffee. “It’s an unforgiving nice environment.” She was talking about the place where she’d lived all of her life long, south central South Dakota, on the Rosebud Reservation, north and west of Valentine, Nebraska.

Her family had come there by way of a famous government plan, the Dawes Act (1889), created by a man who, like most of us, believed in the near-redemptive power of private property. Henry Dawes’s declared that by giving Native folks their own chunk of reservation land, they would gain pride from that ownership, despite the fact that owning land was mystifying to many indigenous folks; second, Dawes and "Washington" felt that allotting reservation land to Native people—and giving them the freedom to do with it what they will—would end the whole tribal system and finally civilize the Indian.

Most historians concede the Dawes Act was a miserable failure that collapsed by way of sheer corruption and graft. White folks took advantage of Native ways and took control of thousands of acres of land originally given to the tribes. On the Rosebud Reservation, it might be hard to discern who the sorriest victims were—the Brule Sioux who lost the land, or the idealist settlers, who naively assumed all they needed to do was put up a soddie and plant some trees and they’d be on their way to the American Dream.

It’s short-grass prairie, where if the almost seasonal droughts don’t get you, the hoppers likely will. She wasn’t at all wrong, I’m sure--the world she lived in was harsh and unforgiving.

One story she told me I’ll never forget. Some great uncle and family moved to the Rosebud, to a vacant spot, from Iowa, where he’d farmed before. He planted corn, just as he always had. Spring rains came and were a blessing, she said. By July 4, the corn was better than knee-high. Life on what was then the frontier was proving promisingly sweet.

One afternoon a blast of wind rose from the south. The temperature had already reached 100 degrees, and that scorching wind—you can know its ravages only by having experienced it—all by itself flattened the entire crop. No tornado. No hail. Just a hot wind and the whole crop was gone.

“The very next day,” she told me, “my uncle put his kids and all his belongings in the wagon he’d rode in on, and left Todd County, South Dakota." He gave the horses a snicker—and they were gone. In the morning there was a promise; by evening it was gone. Everything was dry and withered.

Here in Psalm 90, Moses isn’t talking about the prairie or the harsh open spaces of the Great Plains. He’s talking about us—our aspirations, our lives.

More than anything else, he’s talking about time and the cold hard fact of death, of crops, lush and green, flattened by a searing southern wind.

When you think about it a bit, our lives are like that corn: here today, gone tomorrow. This week I'll be 75 years old. For me at least, all of that has never been more true. 

I know--there’s little that’s sweet about such sentiment. But it’s the undeniable truth. And the truth. . .well, you know the promise the John 8 offers, to all discouraged settlers.