Sarah Westfall writes a newsletter online called The Shelf….. Some days it resonates deeply in my soul…. like this piece called “Work Your Land”.
On March 20, 1997 the Lord called my attention to a beautiful freshly plowed field and said, “This is you.” It led me to 1 Corinthians 3:9: “For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.” I have been through many seasons with God and am now in another season….. He is the One Who Tills and Plows…. I labor alongside Him to bring a harvest, according to His desires. CBB 5/16/22
“A few years ago, friends gifted us a blue coffee mug with the words Work Your Land written across the front. It quickly became one of my favorites. The mug not only nestles perfectly in the palm of my hand (a MUST for avid coffee drinkers), but also carries a message I need to keep near.
Having lived most my life in the Midwestern United States, I am no stranger to the rhythms of agriculture. While not a farm girl myself, I learned early to gauge the health of the corn field across the road by whether it was “knee-high by the Fourth of July.” I could sense the tension when the heat of August was not interrupted by rain. My own father and grandfather tended a large garden in shared our backyard, and I welcomed its bounty. To this day, I can eat a family-sized serving of fresh pole beans in one setting.
So when I got the mug, I knew what it looked like to work the land. But my land was much different.
Instead of soy beans and sweet corn, I was given the land of words and the desire for meaningful connection. I am still learning all that it requires.
The writing part has come a bit easier. Like the famers, my work beckons me to rise early, while also allowing for seasons of rest. I need time to let the ground settle or to find shelter amidst passing storms. Over the years, this type of tending has taught me the perseverance not of performance a slow, sustainable growth. Kinder to the soul.
The connection piece has been trickier.
I am much less patient and far more fearful. It is often easier to romanticize the community I do not have, rather than embrace the perhaps-clunkier reality. It is safer to stay in my head than to till the soil. But then, nothing grows out of idle hands but weeds of loneliness and longing.
Meaningful community requires both presence and perseverance, a willingness to show up and tend to the people in our actual lives. Not another land, but the ground beneath our feet.
In his book Life Together (first published in English in 1954), Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
“He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. […]
If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.
The more we cultivate community with the people in front of us, the more we create space for relationships to grow with time. The more we water connection with gentle intentionality, the more we learn to appreciate the land (whether it is easy to irrigate or a tad rocky). Eventually, we stop eyeballing the horizon and instead enjoy the experience of sinking our fingers deeper into the soil. We discover the richness of right where we are.
I find that the more I tend my small patch of earth and the people in it, lack lessens. The ideal fades into what is real as I learn to appreciate its vastness, the infinite possibility of people once distant becoming familiar.
Because the more we work the land we have been given, the more we learn to love it well.”
-Sarah Westfall