Life & Grace

A retired farmer told me a great story the other day. I thought it was a lot more beautiful than he intended it to be.

One spring he was plowing his land.

I imagined a heavy steel plow violently ripping up the sod, exposing dark earth to the blazing sun. This was business and the ground had to be plowed to prepare for planting. His livelihood depended on getting the most out of every inch of ground. This is not for the feint of heart or the sentimental fool.

Suddenly a Killdeer ran out in front of him shrieking loudly and acting like it was wounded. He knew it was protecting a nest, trying to distract the threat away from its young.

Too bad for the bird. It was the wrong place to put a nest. It should have been more careful. Life is a harsh reality. There isn't room for much grace.

He slowed down and looked carefully ahead until he spotted the nest on the ground. Then he carefully maneuvered his tractor around the nest leaving everything intact.

What? Are you mad? What happened to survival of the fittest? You made a mess out of your field. Now you have a gap in your row. Time is money and you just wasted it and you won't get paid back for it.

Sometime later he was sitting at his kitchen window when a Killdeer came out of the field chirping loudly and trailing several young behind. They marched across the lawn so he could get a good look at them then headed back in the direction they came from. He likes to think it was the same bird he encountered earlier who brought the young by so he could see what he spared and to say thank you.

I think he is right.

It Stays With You

In the May/June 2008 issue of Books & Culture there is an article by David Graham, entitled Heal Thyself, that begins with a quote from C.S. Lewis. "Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we still are." I've been thinking how true this is when it comes to dealing with pain.

I seem to remember another Lewis quote that was something about our lives being like the rings of a tree. (I could be way off on the source of this.) We are constantly adding more rings but the rings we already have are still there. I remember studying tree rings in school. You could easily tell when something traumatic happened to the tree because the rings would be different. Sometimes they would be really small reflecting little growth, caused, perhaps, by a drought. Sometimes they would be very dark suggesting some other serious trauma. No matter the cause the evidence was obvious.

I think that is a helpful way to think of pain. When something painful happens to us it leaves a mark. We grow new rings but the mark is still there to remind us of what happened. The more rings we grow the more the pain lessens. New growth has a way of insulating us to some degree. We may even get to a point where we look pretty good on the outside. But deep inside the mark is always there. It has become a part of us and will never go completely away. It is who we are.