Friday, August 16, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Covenant remembered
On Wednesday I spent an hour with Debra, my spiritual director. We talked about family, and I found much to say about my dad. I see him easily in my mind’s eye, in blue jeans, blue work shirt and work shoes. He isn’t talking much, because he is headed outside to cut weeds with a weed mower that looks like it could kill somebody.
Until I was sixteen Dad milked 40 cows twice a day, just outside our front door, near enough to my bedroom for him to shout my name at 6 or so some mornings. He had been up by then for at least two hours, and he wanted a little help before the whole milking job was done, and before I went to school. In the afternoon the milking began again, and we worked together after school until dinnertime.
We didn’t get along very well, because I wasn’t the farm boy type, at least not for a long time. I preferred reading and writing, and even arithmetic. Although Dad had his accounting degree from the University of Illinois, his own father talked him into farming after a couple of years working for the Farm Bureau.
Dad did income taxes for many neighbors, but he never left the farm. I think he loved the freedom, if you could call it that. There was always too much to do, but you could do it at your own pace. Over time I learned to love it too, after I had spent a decade exploring the rest of the world.
When I did return, Margaret and I lived in a windy old hilltop house on the farm Dad owned. We raised pigs for awhile, and watched the mamas have their babies under the heat lamps. We had three kids and a couple of dogs, and a bunch of puppies. In 1983 I got the chance to rent 240 acres and farm for myself, and Dad let me use his tractors and disc and harrow and planter and cultivator and combine and wagons. But the next year Lincoln College sold the land to another guy, so I got just the year, on my “own.”
I surprised myself at the care I took to plant straighter rows of corn and soybeans, and then to plow out the weeds between the rows with a massive cultivator that cut out the corn just as easily as it cut out the buttonweeds. It felt different, farming these fields for myself. It became real – the foundation I’d been given for twenty years before I looked around for greener grass. My feet settled on the soil and I felt at home.
But this all happened on the tail of my life as a child and teenager, when I rejected Dad’s desire for me to be a dairy farmer, after he had accepted his own dad’s offer. And so I think of our relationship as bittersweet. We spent too long silently in our own corners, waiting.
Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations.
Knowing Dad’s patience with me alongside his equally visible irritation and frustration, I know God better. God’s love for Jerusalem ultimately stood longer and higher than his disgust with the sins of its people.
No one looked on you with pity or compassion, then I passed by and saw you weltering in your blood … I bathed you with water and anointed you with oil. You were renowned among the nations for your beauty, perfect as it was.
But then you were captivated by your own beauty. You used your renown to make yourself a harlot.
Jerusalem betrayed her lover, her groom, her husband, as I in many unconscious and conscious ways betrayed my dad. But like Dad, God hung in there. After the cows were gone Dad did other things, but he still got up at five am and always took a twenty minute nap after lunch. I see him again in my mind taking that nap, lying on his stomach on top of the white bedspread, shoes still on, his feet sticking out off the edge of the bed.
Dad was faithful far more than he was ever angry or bitter. No matter what.
Just as I remember my father for his virtue, so we plow through Ezekiel’s vivid descriptions of Jerusalem’s sin to get to the end of the passage, to God’s promise.
I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were young, and I will set up now an everlasting covenant with you, and you will remember and be covered with confusion, when I pardon you for all you have done, declares the Lord.
(Ezekiel 16, Isaiah 12, 1 Thessalonians 2, Matthew 19)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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