A Field I May Not Cut

The drill goes in the ground at four in the afternoon and Harlan Voss has the lights on by six, because it is the middle of October and the day quits early now.

He is seventy-one. He had something happen in February that involved an ambulance and a conversation in a hallway, and he has a folder of paperwork on the seat of the truck that he does not read in the house because his wife will see him reading it.

The forty on the north side is going into winter wheat.

That is the arithmetic he keeps doing without meaning to. Winter wheat goes in the ground in October and comes off in July. Nine months in the dirt, dormant through the cold, greening up in March, heading out in June. Nine months, and then a combine.

He knows exactly what he is doing. He is putting seed into a field on the strength of a July he is not confident about.

His grandson Toby is in the buddy seat, nineteen, home from a job in town, on his phone in a way that Harlan has decided not to comment on. The cab is warm and smells like dust and coffee and the vinyl of an old tractor seat.

And then Toby, without looking up, asks whether they are running the seed rate higher because of the late date.

Which means he has been paying attention the whole time.

Harlan says yes, a little higher, because the later you go the less time it has to tiller before it shuts down for the winter, and you want more plants going in to make up for the ones that will not make it. Toby nods, still on his phone, and Harlan realizes that he has just been asked a question by somebody who intends to know the answer for a long time.

They go up the field and back. Up and back. The lights push out about sixty feet in front of the tractor and then the dark closes around the rest of it, and Harlan drills a field he cannot see, straight, on the marker, the way he has done it since he was nineteen himself.

He does not slow down. He notices that about himself. There is a version of this evening where a man in his position quits at the fence line and calls it enough, and he can feel that version sitting right there beside him in the cab, and he goes past it.

Last pass, quarter to nine. He shuts it down and the quiet comes in the way it does, all at once.

Toby puts his phone in his coat pocket and looks out at the dark field.

And he says: so when do we cut it.

We.

You have a field like that.

You are putting something into the ground on a schedule that runs past you. Working at something whose good part is out ahead somewhere, sitting in a room you may never see finished, praying for a person who is not turned around yet, and doing the quiet arithmetic in the cab about whether you are actually going to be there for the part that is worth being there for.

You are inside a people who have a harvest ahead of them, and you are expected at it. That is what the written word says about the company Christ gathered, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your own arithmetic on a dark evening, who makes an expectation like that stand up in an ordinary man.

The sower is at the reaping

Psalm 126 is a song people sang while walking. It is one of the songs of ascent, sung by whole families climbing the road up to Jerusalem together, and it opens by remembering a time God brought a nation back from captivity and everybody's mouth was full of laughter at once.

Which tells you the size of the thing. This is not a private wish somebody wrote down in a hard week. It is a people singing about what has been done for a people, and it ends looking forward.

Those who sow in tears shall reap with joyful singing.Psalm 126:5

And here is the part that I want you to actually see, because it is easy to read past.

The sower is the reaper.

It does not say the sowing is worthwhile because somebody else gets the harvest. It does not say your tears water a field for a generation you will not meet. It says the man who went out weeping with the seed comes back carrying sheaves. The same man. The going out and the coming back are one person's journey, and there is a load in his arms at the end of it.

You are counted among the people that promise was made to, and the reaping has your name in it. That is written in Psalm 126, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a song sung on a road two and a half thousand years ago and stands a man up inside it in a tractor cab.

Now let me say plainly who that people is, because this whole site rests on it. The church is a company: everyone who belongs to Christ, in every century and on every continent, corporate and countable and ordinary. A nation, a household, a body, a flock. It is not a private arrangement between Christ and one reader, and it is not a romance. When Scripture describes a table at the end of all this, it is describing a table with a company at it, and every person in the company is at the table because the company is.

You have a chair at that table because the company has one, and nobody is admitted to it one at a time on their merits. That is the plain sense of the written word wherever it describes this feast, and the Holy Spirit is the one who joined you to the company in the first place.

What I am not going to tell you

I am not going to give you a date. There is no timetable on this page, no reading of the signs, nothing about what year anything happens in. That is not mine to hand out and anybody handing it out is handing out something they do not have.

And I am not going to promise you that your July goes the way you want it to. I do not know what happens with your field, your body, your family or your forty acres, and I would not trade your trust for a comfortable afternoon by pretending otherwise.

You have something real ahead of you, and it does not depend on how this particular season turns out. Scripture puts the certainty of that in the Lord who prepares the table rather than in anybody's circumstances, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a hope like that from thinning into a wish.

That is the difference between a wish and an expectation, and it is worth being exact about. A wish is a thing you hope goes your way. An expectation is a thing somebody else has arranged and told you about. The table at the end of this is the second kind. The host has named the guests and the guests are a people, and being in the people is the whole of the qualification.

You are holding an expectation rather than a wish, and somebody else made the arrangements. Scripture has the host doing the naming and the preparing from one end of it to the other, and His Spirit is the one who keeps those two words from blurring into each other on a hard night.