The Year the Fields Did Not Pay

Hollis had never in his life said out loud that God owed him anything, and he sat on the tailgate that October and found out that he had been thinking it since he was about nine years old.

He had done it right. That is the plain truth of it and it needs saying before anything else. He had done it the way his father did it and the way his grandfather did it. He was up before it was light his whole working life. He never took a shortcut that would have cost somebody else. He carried two neighbors through bad stretches and never once mentioned it after. He was in his seat on a Sunday whether or not he felt like it, and he was there more often than the men who told him he should be.

And the year went the way it went. A wet spring that would not let anybody on the ground, then eleven weeks of nothing, then a hailstorm on a Thursday afternoon in July that took about forty minutes and did the rest of it.

He walked out there afterward, which is what everybody does and what nobody can explain.

And he sat on the tailgate of the truck at the end of the row with his hat off, and what he felt was not grief. Grief he knew. Grief he had buried a wife with.

What he felt was that a bargain had been broken.

And right behind that came the shame of it, because Hollis is not a man who thinks God is running a shop. He would have told you so. He'd have said it plain and believed himself while he said it.

But there it was on that tailgate. Sixty-one years of holding up his end, and a field that looked like somebody had gone at it with a stick.

He did not say a word about it to anybody for most of a month.

What finally got him was his granddaughter, who is six and has no sense at all about when a person wants to be left alone. She came out and climbed up on the tailgate next to him one evening and sat there swinging her legs, and after a while she said: Papa, you don't have to talk. I just wanted to sit by you.

You don't have to talk. I just wanted to sit by you.

Hollis sat on his own tailgate at the end of a ruined row and found his eyes had gone, and he could not have explained it to one soul in that county.

And the sentence that came to him, sitting there, had nothing to do with the crop.

He thought: I have been keeping an account since I was a boy, and nobody has ever once come out here to look at the numbers.

Let me say the word plain

Before we go on I want to say plain what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a yield, not what is owed. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a man because he belongs at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does a startling thing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping put in front of the men whose year came to nothing.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked. Farming well is not a sin. Wanting a crop that pays is not unspiritual, and nothing on this page ever ties what God does to what a man has or what he gives. That wire is not run here and it will not be. If you are truly short, if there is a note due and a date on it and a knot in your gut, that is a real thing that wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And one more thing before we go further. Whoever taught you the bargain, and somebody did, in a pew or a kitchen or a whole way of talking you grew up inside, is not on trial here. I do not know their name and I would not use it if I did. Most of them believed it themselves and were trying to hand you something solid. What I want to look at is the bargain, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

A man who counted it all out and then said yet

Habakkuk writes the end of his book after arguing with God for two chapters and getting an answer he did not much care for. And what he writes is the most agricultural sentence in Scripture, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it out to men on tailgates ever since.

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18

Count what he lists. Fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd. That is not a poetic gesture. That is every single income a man in that country had, named one at a time, deliberately, the way you would read down a page.

He does not explain the loss. He does not say it happened for a reason and he does not tell anybody what the reason was. He does not promise next year. He counts the whole thing out to zero, out loud, and then he says one word.

Yet.

You are not a bitter man for what came up on that tailgate. You are a man who was taught, by good people, that the arithmetic worked, and you did the arithmetic honorably for sixty-one years. The written word does not scold Habakkuk for wanting figs, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man hear that as company instead of as correction.

And here is the thing that costs something to say and is worth saying. If God had ever been running a bargain, you would have every right to your complaint in that field. The reason the complaint has nowhere to go is not that you fell short of the terms. It is that there were never terms. He was never a party to it, so you were never in breach and neither was He.

What the sixty-one years were actually doing

You are loved outside the account, right now, and that is not a thing being offered to soften a bad October. His word says the God of my salvation is the joy, present tense, with the fields already counted out to nothing, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact on a tailgate rather than a line in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open out there. It wasn't the hail. You'd seen hail.

It was a six year old climbing up beside you and saying you don't have to talk, I just wanted to sit by you. It was somebody coming out to the field for no reason connected to the field. You were hungry to be sat by. You still are, and there is not one thing soft about that in a man of your age.

Here is what the word has settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Not one of those sixty-one years is lost, and not one of them was a payment, and both of those are true at once. Jesus told about a father who ran down a road, and running was a thing a man of that standing simply did not do, and He did it toward somebody who came home with nothing at all to show. He was on that tailgate before your granddaughter climbed up.