Are you hungry? How many times a day does your body "ask" for nourishment? Upon whom do you depend for food?
Life on a farm brings us about as close as we can get to the root of physical provision. When your hands make room in the dirt for a seed that grows and clears weeds from the ground around a blossoming plant and severs the ripe fruit from the stem, you can't miss the wonder of "our daily bread." On the farm, we learn that food is not something that will perpetually line the grocery store shelves. It is a precious gift from the Creator to His creation. A timely, daily, miraculously enduring reminder of our dependence on what we cannot truly guarantee for ourselves.
In a small way, the power of provision comes home when we feed our animals every morning. Here the hogs come running to greet us, barking ecstatically, tearing up the deep rich soil of the forest floor in their mad haste like a crowd of play-weary children to the abundant table...because they know we bring dinner. A mass of pig weed from the broccoli patch or the leavings of fresh veggies from our own meal sends their whimsical little tails wagging. Yes...pigs wag their tails in joy. They keep time with the curly little appendages while they plow trenches through dirt with their shoveling noses or strip leaves from the stems of vegetation with their pearly teeth.
There are the chicks, still mildly adorable in their half-fluff, half-feathered state, half submerged in the verdant sea of emerald pasture, stretching tiny stout legs with a lazy "cheep" and a hazy blink of the eye in the morning light before they waddle a foot for a tasty morsel of clover. Even after the last vestige of cute "chick-ness" has melted away into the clumsy fatness of "chicken-hood," there will be a smile of satisfaction on my face every time I see their enthusiasm for fresh grass.
The infinite satisfaction that accompanies the sight of contentment in a living creature should not surprise us. Food, when abundant, can become the most vapid and commonplace element in a day, but the lack of it for any amount of time is disconcerting and detrimental, while great depravation can become a source of panic and even insanity. As surely as you will become full after eating dinner tonight, so surely will your belly beg for more tomorrow morning. In this way we are never permitted to forget our indebtedness, in recognition of which fact generations have preserved a tradition of thanksgiving prayers before every meal. A farmer is in some ways like a father to his beast, and how imperfectly yet lucidly does this reflect the granting of life we have from our Father.
I think of this often. Does the fruitfulness of a vine ever overwhelm you? Do the life-giving veins of a leaf beat a stained glass window hollow for you? Can the tenacity and forgiveness of herbage to freshen in rain after drought enthrall you? Will wind rushing down the breath of a storm to cool the day make you want to run with it to the end of the earth? Does the hap-hazard rocking-horse-plunging of a pig in sheer jollity make your laughter overflow?
In time long past, God asked Job this question:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb,
when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said,
‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?
Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
and caused the dawn to know its place...?”
from Job 38
How much of this can you or I bring about, or preserve until tomorrow? The question knows its own answer, as we should. We could ask in return:
“O Lord...what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” from Psalm 8
The wonder is not that there is hunger and even dire want in the world, but that there should be a yield to our need at all. I will venture to repeat the words of my forbears in this. There is nothing you or I can do to deserve our daily bread more than another, so be like the chick who waits with certainty on us for his food and the pig who rejoices unstintingly at the coming of dinner.
Eat with thankfulness on your lips today, for no man can truly know where his next meal is coming from apart from the bountiful provision of our heavenly Father.
“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”
Psalm 34:8
